First of all, my solution to use a cheap usb-attached external drive passed through to a VM running on a tiny Optiplex machine… yeah, don’t do that. Or at least don’t use a cheap USB-attached external drive. It broke. Since it was primarily used to store a redundant live copy of my data, no harm was done, other than wasting money on it, but that was covered by a warranty, fortunately. But after that fiasco I decided to invest in a proper external NAS solution.
I had my cold copy NAS server running TrueNAS which kept all non-redundant data I didn’t really need all that much, like notes from the university, all my courses and certificates as well as a cold spare of my useful data and some media backups. But that is a big, loud and power-hungry device and my energy bills are already higher than an average family of four, so I decided to just buy something off the shelf.
I don’t want to shill for any company, but the solution I went with was from a company that starts with a Q and rhymes with snap. At first I naively thought that a 2-disk machine would be enough… it wasn’t. So after less than 6 months I bought a new 4-bay +2 NVMe box and populated it with 3 4TB hard drives (which are in fact 3.67 TB, seriously, the difference is more than an average hard drive 10 years ago! How is this legal?) and added 2 NVMes sniped on a black friday sale a month or so later. That gave me a nice, fairly quick and most importantly stable disk space to keep my media and backups, including VM snapshots.
You can say it’s cheating, but honestly, it works much better than what I had running on the Optiplex “server”, which kept getting overwhelmed with the way I was using it. If keeping your data safe is the priority and you don’t want to spend hundreds of <insert currency unit here> on electricity for running a full PC tower stuffed full of hard drives under your desk, a box like that is a valid solution. And in case you’re interested, I gifted the previous two-bay NAS box with 2 brand new hard drives to my sister. I had to do data recovery on her laptop enough times to know that they needed it.
