technology

+1 for mergerfs+snapraid. I have this setup on an old Terrastation running a special build of debian. Was really easy to setup.

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.

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.

Fr. I've always looked at it like, I live in the US I'd be far more worried about the government that actually has power over me.

That said I still prefer FOSS

I've always gone with a hotswap enclosure connected to an old raspberry pi - or whatever computer I can scavenge - over USB. Probably not the most performant but I don't use them as network mounts so its w/e.

Regarding mix-matched drives: just extend them manually with LVM and don't fuss with anything like zfs or RAID. If you've got an SSD in there you can use it as a cache with LVM.

waiting for new rockchip to liberate me from 86 prison via ugreen/minisforum

buy old used one if you don't care about transcoding stuff, it's not like 2-4 sata box advanced a ton aside from that (if you do care about transcoding, but don't need lots of shit in containers, smol ugreen with rockchip, allegedly, works very well with jellyfin))

I would also like to know.