Evening people. Ok here is my situation. I have a reasonably good Gaming PC and it has several hard drives fitted and i want to slim the system down a bit to tidy things up. Now i have the following fitted. 256gb samsung M2 970 evo ( windows 10) 2 x 500gb crucial mx500 ssds (games) 1 x 500 gig hdd (backup) 1 x 1tb hdd (backup) I would like to remove the 2 HDDs but im not sure what route to take? Do i buy a couple of caddies? Or what about a NAS drive? Do i build one myself or buy a enclosure and install my two HDDs? Or do i buy a pre-built one?
A cheap option is to use a spare/older/lower spec PC. Fit extra NICs if you need them or want to channel bond and install something like XPEnology, FreeNAS or OMV. The latter two are arguably more indepth/feature packed but XPEnology is basically a freely available version of Synology's open source DSM software, and much more user friendly, IMO.
I would have recommended XPEnology up until got round to upgrading my box from 5.X to 6.2. It's so much of a faff now with having to very specific things to get stuff working right. Also to top it off the PAT file for the model of DSM I used no longer supported Synology Hybrid RAID. In the end I sacked it off for unRAID. Still pretty user friendly and can use mismatched disks and still have one or two disk Parity. The addition of Docker is a nice touch. My only real complaint is the lack of iSCSI support, as it has now made my Windows File Server redundant as you can't have persistent NFS mounts in Windows.
I'm just going through a similar process. I am also looking at power draw of the donor PC/NAS as it can mount up as it'll be running 24/7. Something you may want to consider. https://www.switchwise.co.uk/electricity-cost-calculator/
I feel like this is going overboard a little bit with the advice here. The two HDDs are labelled as backup, a total of 1.5TB of space. IMO - dump those and pick up a 2TB external drive in the first instance, which should be largely cost-neutral.
This, or if you do want it on a network then for about £150 you can get a single bay NAS, such as a Synology DS119j, and a 2 or 3TB drive for it.
Thanks for the advice chaps. I went for a WD My cloud 3TB in the end. Managed to get a new one at a bargain price so that will do me. Cheers
