this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Some linux or windows and mergerfs plus snapraid running on some old computer lets you make use of many mismatched drives.
Some linux or windows will give you a platform from which to enable file sharing. If you want a web management interface on top of it there’s a lot of those but it’s not strictly necessary.
Mergerfs merges several filesystems into one big filesystem. It will blob directory matches together, so if two or more of your disks are windows c drives for example it may be worthwhile to make a unique root folder on each drive that contains everything else.
It sounds complicated but actually it’s the simplest thing in the world.
Snapraid makes parity snapshots when you tell it to. It needs at least one drive to use for parity that’s as big as the biggest data drive. It’s different than real raid or zfs because the parity you can use to recover from isn’t real time, it’s as old as the most recent snapshot.
There are many benefits to that arrangement instead of zfs or real raid. If you want to know the trade offs I can elaborate.
The benefit of what’s described in all of the above is that you can use anything to run it instead of needing a nas appliance, which in my experience are hot nasty dogshit until you spend as much money on it as you’d need to get a used 1u server and drive shelf and at that point just get the more reliable, capable device with very broad documentation and widely available parts and service.
If you choose to use an old computer and just hook up all the drives, that’s great and old computers are easy to find and will work fine. The power use is truly negligible but if you were to get a smaller, ostensibly more efficient pc like a crappy little sff dell, you could slap an hba with external ports in it and attach that to some sas enclosure and use all your drives that way with (maybe?) less power draw.
E: I made the same post twice. Age is a harsh lash under which to suffer.