The enclosure is fine but wouldn't it be lovely to transform the enclosure into a fully-blown NAS. There is not too much needed from a hardware perspective given that in order for the enclosure to be shared over the network some PC must implement SAMBA or NFS file-sharing protocols. Similarly, the drive used for the enclosure is just one single drive such that no backplane is needed, not too much RAM is required and the drive can be accessed at USB3 speeds.

A good candidate would be an Intel Celeron-based mini PC from companies like Beelink that make low-cost PCs such as the Beelink T4 mini Pro. The Beelink T4 Pro is priced at about USD100, is a fully-blown x86/64-bit platform and beats the limitations of a Raspberry Pi to a curb. The Beelink T4 mini Pro also has the correct measurements to fit onto the other side of the enclosure in order to create a self-contained solution.

The specifications of the Beelink T4 Pro mini are as follows:

• Intel Celeron N3350,
• 4GB RAM
• Gigabit Ethernet,
• 2.4GHz / 5GHz wireless,
• Intel i915 graphics driver (supports QSV graphics acceleration, both decode and encode)

The Beelink T4 mini Pro has to first be prepared to be mounted onto the drive chassis. Also impressively, compared to Apple hardware, taking apart the Beelink T4 mini Pro is a breeze and requires unscrewing just a few screws at which point the motherboard and the case can be separated (there are two sticky patch-antennas that are stuck to the enclosure but they can be removed carefully with a screwdriver).

The following process is destructive because it removes some standoffs that have inset threads in order to be able to close the case. However, these standoffs must be removed in order to be able to screw the case onto the hard-drive enclosure from above.

The standoffs or distancers are easily removed using a flat screwdriver and applying some pressure. With a little bit of luck, these standoffs will just pop out entirely without ripping in two. In case the standoff rips, then a Dremel is used to eliminate the excess material left over by the PCB spacer.

PCB spacers are added to the bottom of the case and the standoffs will be inside the case with screws being used from the top in order to fasten the case together. Now that we're here, we can take a small pit stop and paint the enclosure as we want. How about some white paint onto some red paint, like the Swiss flag? Some painter's tape is added to the interior of the mini PC enclosure to not end up painting inside the case (even though, it doesn't matter).

The painting process is straightforward even though it would have to be revisited at some later stage because the metal case should have been scratched to make sure that the red paint sticks properly to the hard-drive enclosure. For now though, it gets the point across so the project can be continued.

The next step is to provide power to the mini-PC which will be done by pulling power from the enclosure itself just like for the case fan and in the same spot. On the other end, the power will be supplied directly to the PCB by connecting wires to the power jack on the mini-PC motherboard.

Don't get us wrong, those round power jacks are meant for fast removal but they're really really junk when it comes to being reliable and resistant to accidental shock or torque. Initially, we reverse engineered a power jack and pulled the power to the jack with the jack inserted into the mini PC and then noticed that just by accidentally hitting the drive the mini PC would just go on or off due to the jack making a bad contact. As said, these round power jacks are really meant for equipment that is not meant to be on for large amounts of time given that their quality favors fast removal rather than physical endurance and resistance to shocks.

There we go! Now we have obtained a network attached storage solution with a single large hard-drive as backend. The drive will be connected to the mini PC via an USB-B 3.0 cable. One of the problems here has been to find a USB3 cable that is short because from the mini PC to the hard-drive case there are maybe 10cm and most cables available for purchase are usually meters long. However, we were able to locate a short-enough cable of about that is also nicely braided.

Compared to USB2, the USB3 standard is way more stable and robust such that there is no problem in connecting to the drive via USB. Incidentally, the Beelink T4 mini Pro also has an USB3 stack which seems stable enough such that it makes a great low-cost Small-Board Computer (SBC) that can be used to provide storage to a network. As an example, we have some older Xenon rack-computers that have a whole lot of raw computational power but the problem is that the servers are very old such that they all have USB2 stacks such that connecting the hard-drive to the servers directly would achieve less performance than using this Beelink mini-PC as a literal read-write IO interface between the drive and the network.

It is now possible to install the usual TrueNAS Community Edition, Open Media Vault or OpenWrt on the mini PC. We decided for OpenWrt due to the minimalism and because at some later point in time we'd like to turn this build into a "router plus storage" for reasons of portability. The "router plus storage" paradigm does not seem too bad for small home-labs, in particular if they have to be portable. Ultimately, the hard-drive would just end up connected to a computer via a cable such that this solution just represents an optimization in terms of space.

We also made the most bare-bones choices from OpenWrt, for example, by using NFS combined with Ksmb (kernel Samba instead of the regular user-space Samba) and keeping everything as thin and close as possible to bare metal. The drive will be used as long-term storage, such that some faster storage already exists on the network that is shared by cluster nodes connected via DRBD. This means that the long-term storage does not need to write or commit as often because only "final" data will be pushed onto the storage solution. For that purpose, the mount options can be adjusted to commit data to the network storage every 15 minutes (commit mount parameter set to ). Of course, this means that in case that power goes out, everything that took place in the last 15 minutes gets lost but keep in mind that this is slow and long-terms storage where files are added only in their final form with a backup already existing in the faster storage.

Lastly, the mini PC is set to set its power state to on after a power outage, just to make sure that the hard-drive and the mini PC both start at the same time. The Beelink T4 mini Pro is packed with features and also has 4 USB ports that are distributed around the chassis such that other gadgets could be added. One thing that could be added would be some GSM / GPRS dongle in order to allow mobile connectivity from anywhere. The solution makes a very nice portable router given some knowledge and expertise to roll your own. Note that given the specifications of the Beelink, the computer seems powerful enough to even run Docker containers with OpenWrt offering support for Docker out of the box with a fully fleshed-out interface, such that it could host the whole Servarr stack and Plex / Jellyfin as a complete all-in-all mediabox solution.