Are clouds an acceptable alternative to your own hard drives? -? Any? links to good hardware forums or pointers to external HDD enclosures? with? controllers that never go stand by?

[Robert Heller]

RPi's are cheap.  Nothing stopping you from having multiple "NAS" boxes.  
RPi's since RPi 2's all have WiFi, so you don't need to string CAT6 cables all 
over the house (but if you want Gig speed access, you'll want the CAT6).  
Whether or not you bother with RAID or not will depend...

(Note that there are cheap RPi clones from China that will also work just fine 
as the "brains" of a NAS box.)

There also exist various software packages to keep things sync'ed as well.

At Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:57:02 +0100 "Ubuntu user technical support,? not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 
> On Fri, 2026-02-06 at 10:34 -0500, Robert Heller wrote:
> > there are various alternitives: RPi 5's have a PCIe interface ...
> 
> I want to have lots of individual drives for backup rotations, for
> example (I already have loads, but I need some more). I don't want them
> all to be affected by lightning strikes at the same time, and water
> damage in the kitchen rarely affects the bedroom. In other words,
> ideally I would like to have individual enclosures again that only do
> what they are supposed to do, not a one or two server/s. It may be that
> these enclosures no longer exist, in which case I will have to switch to
> something else or work around the problem with a script, gvfs, smartd
> ... (there is also the problem of software waking up devices that should
> be left asleep ;).
> 

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