I just bought a used Lenovo ThinkCentre M710Q Mini Tiny Desktop PC Computer i5 6400T 1TB SSD Win 10 Pro from Ebay for $289 AUD and plugged in some oldish external SSDs and HDDs and now have 10TB of storage. I’m really pleased with it, it took about half an hour to install Proxmox and I’ve now got 5 VMs up and running.

I wouldn’t recommend a WD My Cloud Home - it’s not a NAS as such, it’s a bit limited; I’d go for a Synology. or One Drive as you suggest - a 1TB plan is quite reasonable with regards to cost.

Thanks for the responses; it seems I can’t really do it. I looked into ZFS but if I use that it halves the available disk space to 2TB. I’m using the VM for a media server and thought it would be better to have 1 4TB space instead of 2 2TB disks. At the end of the day it isn’t a big deal, I just thought I’d be able to present both disks as 1.

I use uptime kuma for monitoring - really easy to set up and very versatile

But I can see this embolden racists / homophobes. They are generally dumb, and will probably refuse to serve people citing this decision and will either end up in court or get away with it.

I don’t have kids but am perfectly happy to pay more tax to make education free or cheaper. How can anyone argue that a less educated society is better? The more people that can experience higher education is plainly a good thing. There could be someone out there who could make a medical or technological breakthrough but doesn’t get the chance because they can’t afford to go to college.

Thanks for all the suggestions - I think Tailscale is the way to go, it didn’t take me long to set up and there is a client for all my devices.

I think Water Wars are also a concern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_conflict

Adding my 2c - I think it depends on if you want something that just works out of the box, or if you want to tinker and play with a DIY solution. I have a Synology DS220+ that just works, is easy to manage, has loads of apps etc. I also have a Raspberry Pi with Openmediavault installed and 3 SSDs attached which required a bit of setup, is more complex to get things working, also has apps (plugins) but is more of a project.