I might have messed up… I recently bought a 4TB SSD, Samsung 870 EVO, for the purposes of moving all my data from fragmented external Hard drives to one SSD that I can have SATA’d on my desktop.

Then I realized I’ve always wanted a RAID setup and the peace of mind that comes from the array. The first thing that comes to mind is a NAS setup, but for me to buy that and another two disks is about $400 and I’ve already spent $220 on the 4TB mentioned above, which I’d probably like to keep anyway, because like yourselves, I’m a Data hoarder.

Doing some searches online, others seemed to imply a NAS and RAID are nice but my original idea of moving everything to an SSD is also sound, even without RAID array protection.

Now I’m paralyzed with indecision and really want to move all my data from the external hard drives I have to a single source, and because I manage my Family’s pictures and videos, it has a lot of sensitive data I never want to lose.

Am I over thinking it, should I just move everything to the Samsung 4Tb attached to my home desktop? I also start to worry about malware risk of keeping it on my workstation, which is why I bought smaller external hard drives over the years, to begin with.

You guys are the kings here, what would the community recommend? Is buying a NAS really the next natural step? Maybe just buy another really large external hard drive which is cheaper? $100 would get me a nice 4TB one, and I could move everything to that, again it wouldn’t be in a RAID though.

The cost of the NAS is what is what is making this decision hard for me, and the fact that I just got this nice Samsung SSD.