The chassis of these boxes are generally about the same height as a 3.5" drive so you have no chance of stuffing a big, fairly hot spinning disk in there. As I said I use an HPE Microserver Gen10 Plus for mass storage and that's compact considering what it holds, but if you like this form factor they do usually have 4-6 USB ports on them so technically you could add an external drive array that way.
However I do think you'd be better off using something that's designed to be a compact NAS in the first place (either off the shelf or self built). These are really great compute units - you could offload Plex re-encoding to them, for example - but mass storage is not their purpose in life. There is a next size up in most of these devices and even those aren't great for cramming drives into either, it's just not the manufacturers' design criteria.
I have an Optiplex 7050 Micro from which I'm typing this message
So I know the form factor, but what isn't documented from anything from most of the manufactuers is the HDD height compatibility.
It doesn't appear to be possible with my unit, or the 9020M, documented in
this blog post
My use case is to send something pre-built to family overseas with Debian and Tailscale for a semi-managed Plex instance. Given the travel restrictions currently in place (and ~30 hours of travel without restrictions) something stable, not hacky and as simple as possible is key.
My decision criteria revolves loosly around:
- Serviceability - Can I walk someone through replacing the fan or 2.5" HDD easily? The Optiplex 7050M is great in this aspect.
- Power efficiency - All content will be direct play, so no transcoding required.
- Size - It must be as small as possible.
- Lifespan - 2 years of service, 3 would be even better.
- Appearance - It'll be placed in the middle of an open TV console unit, so not having a bunch of USB HDDs or a mess of cables is a plus
- Ease of use - Power button for power-on or shutdown.
- Low noise. Synology makes some nice units like the DS220+, but two 3.5" disks whirring is a lot of noise in a quiet living room. I have various Synology units with differing amounts of drives, so I've ruled this out already.
- Cost. The most applicable Synology unit (DS220+) is much more expensive than a TMM style box, and arguably less capable. Large capacity M.2 or SATA SSDs way overkill, and too expensive.
- Tailscale. Absolute must have for manageability.
- 'Shipability' - I'll be sending this far overseas, so components need to be relatively secure, or easily re-assembled by non-technical people with some instruction over video call. Obviously, weight and size is a consideration here.
- Quality/Support - I'd rather stick with one of the big manufactuers where quality is good and parts are readily available from eBay vs something like Zotac/Gigabyte/Asus. I was considering an Asus VivoPC VM42 I have here, but can't get the proprietary HDD screws from *anywhere*
- Dual-drive isn't essential, but having boot on a seperate drive (eg M.2 SSD) means easy replacement of a media drive if it fails.
I've toyed with the idea of a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM and a Samsung Endurance MicroSD card for the OS along with Plex database/media on a USB HDD (with seperately purchased short cable) but a 1L MicroFF box is the much more performant and elegant solution.
There are some
15mm 5TB drives on the market (Seagate, ugh!) and this is what I'm looking at. An option might be to 3d-print a new HDD cage, but if there's an option to get something that supports a 15mm drive off the shelf, that would be my go-to.