Looking for a LAN-connected multi-bay JBOD enclosure for multiple APFS HDDs (no RAID, no NAS OS)

To help you get started, here's my suggestion for a basic hardware layout:

Host Mac

• Use a Mac mini (M2 or later) running the same macOS version as your MacBook Pro. This acts as a “storage bridge” — not a NAS — hosting your eight drives and sharing them over your LAN. It can operate headless and auto-login at boot.

Drive Enclosure

• Connect your existing drives to a multi-bay Thunderbolt 4 or USB-C JBOD enclosure, such as:
  • OWC ThunderBay 8 (Thunderbolt 3/4) — supports eight 3.5" SATA drives, mounts each as a separate APFS volume.
  • TerraMaster D8-300 or Yottamaster USB-C 8-bay JBOD — if Thunderbolt isn’t essential.
• Each disk will mount natively in Finder on the Mac mini, exactly as if connected to your MacBook Pro.

Networking

• Connect the Mac mini via Gigabit or 10GbE Ethernet directly to your Fritz!Box.
• Your MacBook Pro can then access the drives over your mesh Wi-Fi using standard SMB file sharing (System Settings → General → Sharing → File Sharing).
• Enable “Share as a Time Machine backup destination” only if you intend to back up to any of the drives.

I completely understand what you’re trying to achieve — a centralized, LAN-accessible enclosure that behaves like a direct USB connection for multiple APFS drives, all visible individually in Finder. Unfortunately, macOS doesn’t provide a native way to expose multiple disks over a network at the block-device level without an intermediary operating system or protocol translator. In short, there’s no “pure macOS” JBOD-over-LAN solution that preserves APFS volume behavior exactly as if the drives were locally connected.

The closest practical setup would be to use a multi-bay Thunderbolt 4 or USB-C JBOD enclosure (like OWC’s ThunderBay 8) connected directly to a Mac mini or Mac Studio acting as a lightweight “storage bridge.” That Mac can share each drive individually over SMB to your main MacBook Pro. You’d still see each drive in Finder under its original name, and the drives remain removable and APFS-readable if disconnected. It’s not “no-OS,” but using macOS as the host avoids proprietary NAS firmware while keeping everything Apple-native and simple.

You’re either going to need to connect a direct-attached storage array (configured as JBOD) to a Mac and use that Mac as a NAS, or you’re going to need a NAS with JBOD hardware capabilities.

Because there is no means to connect a disk or an array to a network without a NAS operating system involved, such as using a Mac as a NAS.

Not this side of something like a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network, which is a configuration likely well out of contention here and that for exclusion for various reasons.

There are open-source and commercial NAS options.

The only way to access APFS is involving a Mac, too.

For direct-attached storage arrays, I mostly use Promise Pegasus arrays for that, and those do provide JBOD support, though RAID storage pools are more common locally.

It may also be better to move to larger-capacity HDDs too, if those 3.5” HDDs are older and particularly lower-capacity. I’ve worked with a number of folks that were understandably looking to preserve their collection of smaller 1 and 2 TB HDDs, and it was cheaper to configure a single 12 TB or 24 TB new HDD, partitioned. Or for some added hardware reliability RAID’d.

And an earlier conversation with Barney-15E about network-attached with no-NAS HDD questions, too.

You're very welcome. Let us know how it goes.

well NAS is short for network attached storage so there is no getting around NAS and even if without a gui then a network attached device would need some sort of "operating system"