NaibofTabr , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

You want to pool 2 drives managed by software RAID with 4 other drives in an external enclosure managed by hardware RAID, connected via USB?

Yes, this is a terrible idea, as you already suspect. If you even get it to work, it will be unstable and the USB bus will be a nasty bottleneck for data transfer.

For less than the price of a good 4-bay NAS you could get a used Dell PowerEdge server. If that is outside your price range, consider one of the PowerEdge towers.

This would be a significantly more stable and reliable setup, and offers room for future expansion. In addition, if data hoarding is the goal, you would be able to use an OS like TrueNAS which would give you better control over your drive pool(s).