Ext USB HDD Tower to NAS?

[cosmichobo]

G'day,

I have a Mac mini 2020, with an "Icy Box" USB3 external hard drive tower connected to it, with 4 drives all formatted for Mac.

The device has been not amazing from the start, but was a lot cheaper than a NAS option at the time, so I made do.

I am however having more and more issues with the device spontaneously dropping out (ie all 4 drives disappear, then reappear after a while), so ready to move on.

I used some kind of "My Cloud" WD device a long time ago - my only "NAS" type experience to date...

Am I correct in thinking I will need to reformat all of my drives to a non-Mac format? And thus - will need to find a way to shuffle about 10TB of data around between drives to accomplish this?

And... What NAS would you suggest?

cheers

cosmic

 

[Bigwaff]

Am I correct in thinking I will need to reformat all of my drives to a non-Mac format? And thus - will need to find a way to shuffle about 10TB of data around between drives to accomplish this?

Yes, if you plan to use the drives in a vendor NAS, assuming the drives are even compatible.

 

[Mike57000]

Don't forget your backups, especially with a NAS.
To avoid disks spin up and down, try Amphetamine with Drive Alive option ON.
(and create at root level of each disk a folder "amphetamine" to avoid disk icon blinking)

 

[jackerin]

And thus - will need to find a way to shuffle about 10TB of data around between drives to accomplish this?

The data shuffling is probably the most tedious thing IMO. I went through it not long ago when I centralized all my harddrives to one NAS (before that I had data spread out over several different drives).

I would recommend just getting fresh drives for the NAS. I went the way of getting a larger drive that would accomodate it all, first transferring from all drives onto that, then shucking the externals and putting into the NAS, then another transfer. Besides taking a very long time, there was the worry that if the larger drive failed then I would lose pretty much all of it.