I’m looking around to see if it’s worth it to buy an off the shelf NAS appliance and every single review has a whole mess of comments like “DAE CHINESE COMPANY CCP”
like motherfucker you live in burger land shut the fuck up
PS: can anyone recommend an inexpensive NAS appliance that I can throw an open source NAS OS on to serve up a few mismatched hdd I have kicking around?
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.
Can you clarify what you mean by “HBA”?
Uhh it stands for host bus adapter I think. It’s the word for a sas add on card. They make about a million different kinds that are all secretly the same card and just have different numbers of plugs, location of plugs, card dimensions or interfaces and support different protocol versions.
An hba will let you plug up to any sas thingy and talk to it. If that thingy is an enclosure then all the drives in the enclosure will be directly addressable as if they were directly plugged into your hba inside your computer instead of connected to your computer by a wire.
Sata is physically and electrically one way backwards compatible with sas, so a Sata drive can plug into a sas enclosure but the reverse isn’t true.