[US] Recommend USB HDD enclosures (1 or 2 bay)

Very off topic of course.

My media server is small (~8TB) so I can fit it all on a single HDD. I'm looking for recommendations for a USB enclosure that would work the best with a NUC-like miniPC I already have. Must be at least 5Gbps port (USB A preferred but USB C is fine). 2-bay is fine (as long as serial numbers/SMART are reported well to Ubuntu), so I can using snapraid for some parity.

I've tried a couple from Amazon (Yottamaster 2 bay for eg) and heat has been a bit issue - they don't have any fans. So I'm looking for a decent solution that I can use 24/7.

@Animosity022 curious what you use for your 20TB staging drive.

I use a 4 bay personally with a System76 machine miniPC.

Amazon.com: Mediasonic USB 3.2 4 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure – USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps Type C | USB-C (HF7-SU31C) Support 18TB HDD : Electronics

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Nice. Mind saying more about your setup (with the software)? I've yottamaster and orico enclosures and they seem to mess up serial numbers which makes everything quite challenging.

I don't really do anything special. Fedora Linux, few drives and rclone.

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Got it. The reviews on that unit seem to also call out terrible heat dissipation so I'll assume you have the door off.

Nope. In my basement and no heat issues.

Okay I just got the probox (HF2-SU3S3) and so far it seems just like other enclosures I've tried. SMART works just fine, however fdisk -l and by-id don't show the serial numbers (2 drives in my case):

usb-ST8000VN_004-2M2101_152D00539000-0:0
usb-ST8000VN_004-2M2101_152D00539000-0:1
usb-ST8000VN_004-2M2101_152D00539000-0:1-part1
$ sudo fdisk -l | grep -i Model
Disk model: 004-2M2101
Disk model: 004-2M2101

This means disks won't have stable identifiers (moving them from one bay to another can cause issues). I believe this can be mostly worked around by setting disk labels during formatting. More testing is needed though.

The other bad thing about it is that after a power outage, the enclosure doesn't automatically turn on. I have sync disabled (I'm okay with it being always on) but even with enabling it, I wish it would automatically turn on.

Will do more testing.