The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/nostrademons on 2025-02-17 00:15:06.
I've got an existing System76 Thelio that's already running a Samba fileshare for home use. It's tucked away in a home office in a corner of the house (i.e. I'm usually not at the terminal, and its primary usage is as a server for fileshares, backup, data analysis, programming projects, and eventually Plex and Wikipedia and possibly Home Assistant). The other household users are all on MacBooks or tablets and like to move around the house.
I'd like to expand my storage by 70-80TB to support my increasing data-hoarding habit. The Thelio doesn't support 3.5" drives, so I basically want a box where I can throw multiple 14-20TB hard drives in it as my storage needs increase. Most of this data is non-critical, i.e. copies of Wikipedia in case the Internet goes down, some entertainment for the kids so I'm not out of my mind if there's an outage, the contents of the CDC website for when that's removed from the Internet, etc. We already have a backup solution for our actual important files that involves external hard drives + offsite cloud backup. RAID is not an important consideration. I would like to stay away from proprietary storage formats because data lives forever but hardware gets swapped out and mix-and-matched. Low power consumption would be nice (the Thelio consumes a fair amount, and its sleep/wake system seems a little wonky) but isn't an absolute must.
Would I be better off with a NAS that all home users can access, or a DAS (disk enclosure) that I hook directly up to the server and then share through Samba? At first I figured that it's not worth the extra price premium for the NAS since I've already got a server with Samba setup. But a lot of the posts here say that they've had reliability issues with USB or eSATA external enclosures. While it's not the end of the world if the data disappears, it would be pretty annoying, since the whole point of hoarding it in the first place is so that it's available when we need it.
I've been searching through the archives but I seem to get a different consensus depending on which thread I view and whether it's r/homelab vs r/DataHoarder. Also recs for specific products are welcome as well.