I meant I probably should not buy 2-bay NAS with just USB2, if that still exists. There’d be not much to expand to once I put those two starting drives in. So preferably more bays/slots to put another drive there once the need arises. Or use expansion units like all of these offer (Synology is eSATA I believe, others have USB).
Comment on Synology/QNAP/Asustor
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 1 month ago
What do you mean by “possibility to upgrade storage other than just replacing drives with bigger ones”
That’s pretty much all you can do with a fixed number of drive slots.
Today’s NAS’s use some form of ZFS/BTRFS, so they’re really good at handling new drives. Though I think dynamic expansion is just coming on line in the latest versions, and may not be in production just yet
kurcatovium@lemm.ee 1 month ago
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Ah, OK.
Yea, not sure if these units can yet support expansion of a data set.
BTRFS and ZFS technically have the capability (from what I recall) in the latest versions, the question is does the device you’re looking at support the capability? I haven’t looked into enough of them to know for sure.
That said, my ancient Drobo can do this, but… It will only see the new size once you upgrade all the drives. It will resilver with a new larger drive but until all drives are upgraded it won’t use the extra drive space of an added larger drive.
(And yes, Drobo is garbage, this one was free, I had some spare drives and I use it as a third local storage device, kind of a spare I don’t really trust).
kurcatovium@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Honestly I’ve never even heard of brand called Drobo.
lorentz@feddit.it 1 month ago
QNAP sells extensions unit www.qnap.com/en/product/tr-004
They usually connect with USB (at least for home grade devices), but my understanding is that they are not seen as block devices so the nas has access to all the single drives like they were internal.
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Oh, cool, that’s slick. I didn’t know this existed!