Right now my hoard is spread across drives of various sizes, generations, and operating systems — mostly stored in my closet. Maybe 20-24TB in all at the moment. The thing is, almost none of it is replicated at the moment.
So I want to get a single drive enclosure (& drives) where I can store everything with some redundancy, as well as make the media available on my home network. I’d like something that I can build out over time, ie. multiple replaceable drive bays that may not all be filled in the beginning. My questions are:
- Is it better to get a networked enclosure, or network it using something like a Pi?
- Are there enclosures that accept HDD and SSD? Should I be looking for one that also takes NVME?
- I’m a RAID newbie. Do these enclosures have built in RAID or do they need to be connected to something running software?
- What kind of enclosure is recommended for this?
- Where is a good source of drives that won’t break the bank, and what should I look for?
Thanks for any help you can offer. I’m hoping to not break the bank since this is unplanned/ I’m trying to sneak it in before the prices go up too much.