One of the things I’ve wanted to do for a long time is to consolidate all my NAS and NAS-ish devices into one clean box. There are two main reasons behind it.
So here we go.
On the bottom rack of the TV table, I have four NAS and NAS-ish devices that come in different brands, sizes, #of drive bays. The 2 TB WD My Book Live dates all the way back to the year of 2011 and really should retire soon :D
Right off the bat, there are two issues. First, having four separate (and very different) devices makes the whole setup really messy. I started with one NAS and then bought another after another after i run out of space on the existing ones. In some way, it is like having a bunch of external hard drives laying around, and buy new bigger drives when old ones are filled, only ends up with more clutters. Ironically, this is actually one of the problem that a NAS is intended to help. The problem is that I wasn’t making any plan back when i made those purchase decisions, and always thought that it is not worth the cost to go full out on a DIY NAS server for my needs.
The second issue is that rather than having big merged storage pool, the spaces are fragmented across all these devices. Even worse, the only way to have some levels of redundancy is to run RAID 1 in both of my 2-bay systems, leaving more space-efficient RAID configurations off of the table even if the number of drives that I owned would allow it. Maybe, just maybe, it would also be nice to have some performance upgrade and move to an open source platform so that I can have some fun with VMs, containers and other stuff to play with. After-all, these devices’ ARM-based processors are quite weak, with the oldest one dating all the way back to the year of 2011, and all of them running their proprietary software.