I'm looking for a barebone mini-PC with an eSATA port, preferably fan-less, to run my external 3.5" HDD RAID box. Can anyone please suggest an option?
Doesn't look like these things exist anymore, everything has moved to USB 3.x but that lacks proper RAID/S.M.A.R.T control.
My old one was this ZBOXNANO-ID61-U, it wasn't fan-less but it had been doing the job very well for 3+ yrs running Debian until it died in a drop accident.
I have a dongle but Linux can't do much for power management and SMART monitoring for the RAID over USB3 to eSATA.
I would buy a NUC that supports Thunderbolt and use a TB to ESATA adapter.
E-sata is very much outdated at this point, never gained much traction and you can barely find anything nowadays that does eSATA natively. You'll always need a dongle.
True but I still have my 4TB raid box which was quite an investment a while ago, never failed me and it's eSATA.
This does look interesting! I wonder how noisy it is.
Good option for future use if you buy more drives at any stage
Esata?, I've got an old Dell laptop that has this. 8 years old. An't seen it on any modern pc in a long time.