NAS works with phones, tablets and laptops with egregiously expensive, non-expandable storage.
On iOS/iPadOS, use SSH/SFTP to workaround business-model-challenged "Files" client.
I SyncThing my wife’s laptop to it. I serve a bunch of videos off of it to our AppleTV. All our photos are there.
I have a Time Machine backup of the main system drive (my wife uses TM as well). The whole thing is backed up to BackBlaze, which works great, but I have not had to recover anything yet.
I would like to run ZFS mostly to detect bit rot, but each time I’ve tried it, it pretty much immediately crushed my machine to the point of unresponsiveness, so I’ve given up on that. That was doing trivial stuff, have ZFS manage a single volume. Just terrible.
So now it’s just an ad hoc collection of mismatched USB drives with cables not well organized. My next TODO is to replace the two spinning drives with SSD. Not so much for raw performance, but simply that when those drives spin up, it hangs up the computer. So I’d like SSD for “instant” startup.
Not enough to just jettison the drives, but if opportunity knocks, I’ll swap them out.
Right now I have Plex running on a raspberry pi hooked up to an 8tb external HDD. Works fine, but I want to scale up to the 100-200TB range of storage, and it feels like the market is pushing me towards spending an inordinate amount of money on this. Don't understand why it's so expensive.
With my NAS, I pay for the box, install the drives, and it Just Works with basically no maintenance other than me clicking the upgrade button every few months when it emails me that an OS update is ready.
I could build a similar system myself, but the hardware isn't that much cheaper. Cases, PSUs, hot swappable drive mounts, and all that add up quickly. And when I'm done, I have to install the OS, read the docs to see how the recommended configuration has changed since last time I did this, and periodically log in to look at it because it doesn't have nearly as much monitoring set up out-of-the-box.
Given the choice between the small amount of money I'd save vs the amount of time I'd have to invest in it, I'd rather pay the money and outsource the hassle to the NAS maker.
As to why I don't just hang a bunch of drives off the computer I'm already using:
- Backups. If my Mac dies, I can restore it from the Time Machine on my NAS.
- Noise. The NAS has busier fans than my Mac. It's in a different room from where I spend most of my time.
- I run Docker stuff on it. I don't want those things running 24/7 on my desktop.
- Availability. I want to reboot my desktop occasionally without worrying if it'd interrupt my wife watching something on Plex.
I just don't understand the reluctance of people to put storage in their actual computer(s).