Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I just ordered the bits for my future storage appliance, so I can share what I decided to roll with. I stumbled across the Fractal Design Node 804 case, which has room for 8 x 3.5" drives, and then I got 4 x 8TB WD Red Plus drives to start with, RAIDZ1, and then I can add another 4-disk pool later on down the road. The Red Plus drives run at 5400rpm instead of 7200, that's fine for what I need and saved a few bucks while still keeping me in CMR-drive-land. I also grabbed 2 x 1TB NVMe drives to run as a mirrored pair for the OS. 64GB of RAM so I have some headroom for services I want to run. And I'm going to put TrueNAS Scale on it, which makes it really convenient to run those aforementioned services that I am wanting to run directly on the NAS, like NextCloud and my Linux ISO downloading tool.

Also now that my family has pretty much moved entirely away from using the big clouds as much as possible, I'm now reading some of the other comments here and looking into Backblaze to store my encrypted backups offsite. Not everything, mind you, there is a large percentage of my data footprint that is either easily recoverable or just simply would be non-catastrophic to lose. But the important stuff, that's getting encrypted and put in someone else's internet locker for safe keeping.

If you're dealing with this much storage, it's time to upgrade to a rack. Don't deal with having to shove 10 drives into a packed full-size.

Start scouring 2nd hand auction sites and buy one used. They're pretty cheap as far as solutions go if you can grab them used. Something like this would be ideal: https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/server-nas/RM22-312/

Also, I'd need it to have a USB-type connection for a USB SSD drive to pop-out & connect to my Smart TV for viewing.

Let me introduce you to my friend Jellyfin.

Remember, 3-2-1 is all about not fully trusting any one backup.

I have 4 replicants of my data at home (because any one of them could die at any time) with an online backup. Not the best setup, but it's what I can do at the moment.

As for RAID, that's a solution for a specific problem(s).

I'd start by noting that raid is more about availability, not backup... I suspect you already have that in mind but just in case. Ideally if you are up for learning ZFS, that is one of the most resilient raid tools out there. Most NAS and Unix or Linux OS will have support for this.

Never connect RAID disks via USB... This only causes headaches.

Avoid SATA port multipliers, these can cause problems in raid.

SAS has the most reliable and flexible options for connectivity. Used JBOD chassis, even small, can be found cheaply and will run SATA disks well.

As to cloud data, I strongly recommend BackBlaze. Many utilities can natively interact with it (API compatible with Amazon s3) and you can handle encryption on the fly with several sync options. They are one of the cheapest solutions, and storage is pretty much all they do.

With pretty much any cloud storage, look at the ingress/egress cost of your data too... That is where many can bite you unexpectedly.

Worth noting that when you get to large storage, a good organization method for your data is key so you can prune and prioritize without getting overwhelmed later... Don't want several copies of the same thing eating cash needlessly.

Good luck! And welcome to the wonderful illness known as data hoarding!

The keyword here is DAS - Direct Attached Storage

https://www.snapraid.it/

I build a NAS in 2015. It runs TrueNAS Scale, tons of docker containers for self hosting everything, and 4x 16TB disks in RAIDZ2. I can lose any 2 disks and be ok.

Edit:

I should add that I also ship my data with rsync to back blaze b2, and truenas has built in capabilities to encrypt the datasets before shipment, including directory/dataset names. My shits all up there encrypted and randomly named.

I just JBOD a bunch of random sized disks in various forms of enclosures (a 4-bay cheap piece of Chinese shit filled with 4 random sized HDDs harvested from dead PCs, a couple of USB-3 external laptop drives, two random sized SSDs in their own enclosures harvested from dead laptops) within a linux LVM using WSL2 to host all the drives using a VM of Debian running on a Windows PC.

I think I've kludged together approximately 20 Tb of total disk space, and all i need to do to enable Striped RAID on it all is wait for a refurbished single enormous NAS drive to go on sale on Amazon and enable RAID on the LVM as a separate volume.