Maybe a dumb question. But is this just a matter of copying over? I have 6 hdds I’ve accumulated and want all the data from them on one big drive now. They are all ntfs as they are from windows, but I am going to boot from my mint drive to move the files, just so windows isnt running or accessing anything on the drives while I move the data. I’m transitioning to full linux, but I want to consolidate these drives first. I dont want to clone drives, so no dd here, just copying files from 6 different drives onto 1.
Raid1 isn’t the most performant by itself. (Thats what I mean by efficiency) It is better to use 4 disks with data being written to two disks at a time.
The benefit of a dedicated NAS is that it works with basically any client OS. Both Windows and Linux have good support for SMB so it is just a matter of mounting the drive. Wine doesn’t matter in this case.
@possiblylinux127 To be sure, but I assume since he was formerly running Windows performance wasn’t an issue. No, it’s obvious he is more concerned with getting the clutter factor down so he stated a preference for a single large drive, and if data isn’t important or backed up some other media fine. If not, then you risk losing your data because sooner later drives fail. If performance was really the goal he’d raid a bunch of nvme drives together. This, by the way, is what I do for the system that runs this friendica node, along with an 18 core processor and 256 gb of RAM.