The Definitive Media Server Saga: FreeBSD, ZFS and Escaping Cheap USB Enclosures
The idea was simple: give a second life to two battle-hardened Seagate IronWolf 2TB drives (with over 6 years of continuous uptime) as a high-speed Media Server. The chosen “brain” was a Mini PC running the rock-solid FreeBSD. All I needed was a Dual Bay USB 3.0 external enclosure (DAS) to connect the drives. What I didn’t expect was that this simple premise would turn into a full-blown saga against haunted firmwares and terrible hardware quality — until I finally reached the perfect setup. ...