plug-in-play
And a Bone Apple Tea to you !
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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Haha, what’s the right phrase?
Plug and play
Plug 'n play (or even PNP) is also acceptable, and is likely what you heard before
Plug and play. You plug it in and it starts playing immediately, no more set up necessary!
I seem to be one of the last defenders of hardware RAID, and even I think a portable raid is the wrong approach here.
Which platform is he on? Is ZFS an option?
His personal system is MacOS but I know he works on windows at work. I believe ZFS is an option. I guess, the easier the better. Something that isn’t a ginormous project. I suggested a home server with Truenas, just because that’s what I have. I don’t want to send him down that route if there is an easy option he can just buy and go and be satisfied he met at least RAID 1 safety net.
Whenever I hear MacOS, just assume complete and utter incompetence on my part. I still don't know how to right click to open a context menu.
But for a more general approach, how portable does it have to be, and how much storage would be ideal? A few TB, or are we talking about PB?
He already owns 2 8tb 2.5inch SSDs he is looking to house
Personally, I'd have some sort of enclosure that could also house a raspberry pi and similar, which mounts those disks in ZFS and shares them via NFS. That'd ensure compatibility with any OS, but it might be overkill.
Why use hardware raid instead of software based raid ? Am i missing something ?
Large scale performance. My job involves obscene amounts of storage, and nothing beats a proper raid controller with cache vault. When clustering many storage nodes into one big filesystem, across several machines, any overhead is awful.
On a hobby-level I don't mind software raid. I just don't want to put it into production.
From one hobbyist to another, I've got an absolutely ancient second gen 4-bay Drobo that works fine, but really needs to be replaced with a proper NAS configuration. Do you have any recommendations for a more modern four drive setup that wouldn't break the bank?
As long as you have the ram to run it, I find that ZFS covers most of my needs unless I am dealing with something that necessitates beegfs. My basement server has 12 drives in JBOD, tied together with ZFS, and it works fine.
The post doesn't really say what the goal is, which makes it hard to answer the question.
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Redundancy to improve storage reliability?
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Higher bandwidth?
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Something that can be presented to the camera or a computer as a larger single disk?
Thanks. It’s intimidating writing a post and what’s unnecessary info. Here’s some more! He deals with high resolution video and photos so speed and higher bandwidth is definitely a priority. Upon speaking to him he seemed to have a natural interest in a raid 1 or more option. I think this is just from surface skimming reading. I know he has 2 disks now ready to go. I think his ideal world is a disk that shows up on various computers as a single disk. He works probably 50/50 MacOS and Windows.
He is not IT tech literate but is certainly capable of learning and taking extra steps or guides, if necessary.
You can get a hardware-mirrored external USB3.0 drive with 6TB usable (12TB raw) for under $175 from NewEgg/Western Digital
Just plug it in and it works