I’ve done something like this with a SolidRun CuBox and a cheap external 2-disk RAID1 enclosure connected via eSATA... 8 years ago. It’s still running - I’ve only had to replace disks as they failed, which is expected, with zero data loss. It appears as a Time Machine on the network, backing up a couple of laptops, and as a shared SMB drive for bits and bobs.
To be on the safe side, I mounted /var on the enclosure, so the SD card in the CuBox is not stressed, and that has not failed once in 8 years. It wasn’t the cheapest thing (and it’s absolutely wasted on this task - it has good media capabilities and wifi that I don’t ever touch), but it sits in a small recess out of the way, and has been rock-solid. Every few months I dump all its contents to Glacier because I fear the enclosure will fail before the little box does.
I expect I’ll eventually replace the CuBox with a Raspberry Pi when it dies, but the overall model is sound, for something as simple as a fileserver. Just don’t open it to the internet - a lot of these small boards stop getting OS updates from manufacturers after a year or two, and their custom chipsets make it difficult to work with vanilla Linux - particularly if you need wifi or bluetooth.
To be on the safe side, I mounted /var on the enclosure, so the SD card in the CuBox is not stressed, and that has not failed once in 8 years. It wasn’t the cheapest thing (and it’s absolutely wasted on this task - it has good media capabilities and wifi that I don’t ever touch), but it sits in a small recess out of the way, and has been rock-solid. Every few months I dump all its contents to Glacier because I fear the enclosure will fail before the little box does.
I expect I’ll eventually replace the CuBox with a Raspberry Pi when it dies, but the overall model is sound, for something as simple as a fileserver. Just don’t open it to the internet - a lot of these small boards stop getting OS updates from manufacturers after a year or two, and their custom chipsets make it difficult to work with vanilla Linux - particularly if you need wifi or bluetooth.