I am posting this under Nucleus as it seemed to be the most relevant place to do so. I am looking for some recommendations on HD cases / enclosures. I have not had very good luck with regular external hard drives. They keep crapping out on me after little usage.
I want to purchase some NAS quality HDs and put them in enclosures either one drive per case or a box that will hold up to four hard drives. (A NAS is too complex for me.) I plan on purchasing 12tb hard drives so that eliminates most of the possibilities. I read reviews on Amazon last night and most seem to have issues. Most of them have cheap power supplies that may not hold up over time.
I have a NUC717BNH with the Roon software which of course runs under Linux. I am wondering if I could connect a Thunder3 X Quad to it. I would purchase it for the quality not the speed factor. It seems to have a good power supply. I read that any computer that runs Windows can run Linux and I also read that if you went into the Bios and entered some instructions, it would work. I don’t know whether this could be done in conjunction with the Roon software running on the NUC. Nothing in High End Audio is ever easy.
Last time I heard someone asking about Linux support for thunderbolt on NUC, the answer was still ‘No!’. Use Windows on your NUC if you want to use thunderbolt hard drives.
I just spent another two hours reviewing the enclosures again. All seem to have issues, mainly they run very hot, and would have difficulty operating 12TB HDs like the WD Gold. Hard to justify when you can buy a 10TB WD HD for $200. So I will continue to use external HDs and just keep everything backed up, one at my home and one offsite. At some point hopefully SSD prices will decline enough to make them worthwhile to use. I just saw Micron 8TB SSDs for $750. I need about 20TB as I have a 2TB SSD in my NUC.
I ended up purchasing three RSHTECH aluminum HD enclosures for about $20 apiece. Amazingly out of 66 reviews on Amazon there was not one negative one! Only 2% gave it 2 stars. 79% gave it 5 stars and 17% gave it 4 stars. It was advertised as 10TB capacity, but the seller confirmed that it will work with 12 TB HDs. I will probably purchase better power supplies for them.
I then purchased two WD Gold 12TB HDs and one 6TB. They are almost out of these hard drives as WD discontinued manufacture of them last year and the the Ultrastar replacements don’t seem to operate as well from I read.
