this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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You use mergerfs/snapraid for this. You need one extra drive as big as your biggest drive to do snapraid.
Mergerfs mashes all the drives into one big filesystem, so if you don’t want file name collisions then put a unique root folder on each drive. It’s a pain if you’re serving up drives yanked directly from old pcs but it’s a blessing when you want to make maximum use out of each drives free space.
Snapraid makes a parity snapshot when you tell it to. It needs as much space as the biggest device on your mergerfs. Its perfect when you don’t care if you lose a days work and don’t need bulletproof 100% uptime. If you’re like me and use secondhand drives exclusively, it offers the ability to do n parity which will let you recover from errors that span n disks.
These two systems function independently of each other.
Set all this up on some computer with the drives in it. I think both packages support windows but I’ve only used em under linux. There are a million tutorials on this.
If you don’t have a case/psu/cables for the number of drives you need, it’s better and cheaper to find an upgrading gamer with an old one they can sell you than to get a good, functional usb enclosure. If you plan on making a hoarding habit out of this, a drive shelf and hba with external ports is an affordable solution.