Looking for a small pre-built PC with space for two 3.5" drives

TrueNAS General
1

Currently I am using an oldish OptiPlex PC (SFF) with space for one 3.5" drive. Has anyone spotted a small PC that has space for two drives? eBay purchase would be fine.

Thanks.

2

For TrueNAS you will need a minimum of 3 drives:

  • Boot drive
  • Mirrored data drives

So you will need some way of physically mounting and connecting a 3rd drive (M.2 or SATA). If you are going to buy a used desktop machines then you will need both a case and a motherboard that supports this.

You might be better off with a 2nd hand tower PC with a non-gaming motherboard (lower power consumption) with (say) 4-6 SATA ports.

3

OK, so I need space for two 3.5" drives and one or two M.2 drives. Besides building one myself any suggestions?

4

I am still looking. Any suggestions?

5

TerraMaster’s fit the bill, as long as it’s not out of your budget. (You might find good deals on eBay.)

Here’s an example of one such build that has 2 x HDD bays, 2 x m.2 NVMe slots, 2 x LAN ports, 8 GiB of RAM, and a modest quad-core Intel CPU. (This would work fine as a dedicated NAS / fileserver, but might not be sufficient for runny heavy “Apps”. Don’t even bother with hosting VMs.)

The only caveat is they are usually equipped with low amounts of RAM (4 - 8 GiB), so you’ll have to do your own RAM upgrade, or find a custom upgraded unit from a third-party seller.

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the example above does not have ECC memory, will this not be an issue?

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I don’t think any “small pre-built PC” is going to have ECC RAM. The smallest one I can think of that would would be one of the HPE MicroServers.

The Terramaster unit Winnie mentions is one option; this UGREEN is another:

Two 3.5 bays, 2 m.2 slots (one of which will be needed for the boot device–don’t plan to run TrueNAS from the internal eMMC), 1 2.5 GbE LAN port, 8 GB of RAM (expandable to 16 GB). Again, not ECC. I haven’t used it (I have one of its big brothers, the 6800), but looks like it should fit the bill.

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8

One of ASRock’s DeskMeet miniature desktops seem to support 2 x 3.5" disks, NVMe AND ECC memory if using a CPU that supports such. See this thread for some further information;

These are limited in expandability, but that goes with all small form factor PCs.

Note I don’t know about the other models, (supporting 2 x 3.5" or ECC memory), as I was only looking for modern socket AMD, (aka AM5).

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