What do you mean the addresses are private? Are you double NAT-ed?

As others have mentioned, tailscale or Cloudflare tunnels can solve your problem

Use Samba.

If you want a GUI for samba on ubuntu checkout

- casaos

- open media vault

CasaOS is about as easy as it gets.

curl -fsSL https://get.casaos.io | sudo bash  

It provides a gui front end for docker. You can install it on any debian based system (which mint is). Combine that with the portainer app and there isn’t much you can’t do.

This video by Wolfgang has tons of good information on finding a good low power cpu.

There is a google sheet pinned at the top where people have real world power measurements.

Basically you want to find a low TDP cpu/motherboard combo.

1. You could add more with a usb/thunderbolt/sas jbod expansion.

2. Buy a bigger unit, transfer the drives and sell the old one

3. Clustering/hyperconverged with truenas or ceph

Instead of 3 small drives, why not go for 2 larger drives. You are sort of fighting 2 constraints. That case isn’t meant for 3 drives.

Also I really think you will regret the usb. You could get a pci to SATA connector and put 1 or 2 drives inside the case.

If power efficiency is important, then you will want to look for CPUs with low TDP.

I reccomend this video by Wolfgang

Or this one by hardware haven

They go into depth on low power home servers.

Something like this?

Obviously this is make for ripping DVD/Blu-Rays, but combined with software like Automatic Ripping Machine, I feel confident that you could automate 90% of this. (Still would need to put disks in, and rename any folders that were created).

Based on the fact that you are dealing with medical files, you likely have HIPPA hoops to jump through, so using a unmanaged second computer might be out of the question. (As an it administrator I would not allow a raspberry pi or similar access to the VPN/Network). You may have luck asking IT for a second computer (that they control), and then do the USB drive option.

CasaOS can mix and match, but it uses mergerFS which doesn’t have the same parity as ZFS/ceph/raid.

Im also a big fan of CasaOS and run it. You should also check out ZimaOS alpha release as it has more raid functionality.

ZFS needs roughly 1GB of ram per TB of storage.

Truenas code is older and runs on BSD. 99% of people will want to run Scale.

What’s your budget?

For a very clean professional look and future proofing I would add smurf tube behind the drywall and add a media enclosure

Unraid- if your drives are different sizes. Truenas - if you have lots of ram and like ZFS. CasaOs - If you like pretty things. Proxmox + Open Media Vault - If you want to run vms.

Completely False? No known 3.5 external that isn’t normal inside?

You sure about that?

What about these drives that have a USB interface instead of SATA.

I have that exact terramaster for sale. It would work with smb/nfs/iscsi.

Other options using your existing hardware.

• longhorn (rancher)
• ceph

If you want a beautiful front end for docker containers

CasaOS/ZimaOS Cosmos-server Unbrel

Otherwise

• proxmox
• truenas
• unraid

What’s your intended workload? This sounds good for just archival, but not for anything performant. What are you doing for parity drive?

That article is confusing. They claim you don’t need to worry, then they drop a sentence like this.

Even a worn-out SSD would still go a year without data loss, according to the original presentation, and that’s while being stored at 87 degrees Fahreneit the entire time

So which is it? If I have a SSD in a drawer I sure hope it will last more than 1 year.

How much does power cost in your area? The 13400F has a TDP of 65 watts. Not bad, but not great for a system running 24/7.

CasaOS fanboy here, I’ve also been driving the new ZimaOS alpha. I’ve got to admit Cosmo-server looks pretty darn appealing.