Shimitar

I run a setup very similar for many years. Upgraded progressively from 2x120GB to 4x4Tb, from mechanicals to sdds.

I can say don’t cheap out on the usb enclosures, the more you pay the better it is. I purchased a 4 bay JBOD usb3 box with a fan (150€+ nowadays) and that is the only enclosure that really worked out and still works (but retired) today. All single disk enclosures will fail sooner or later depending on how cheap they are, just take that onto consideration.

The setup itself is pretty good and stable, I would suggest standard Linux MDRaid 1, and on top of that something simple like ext4. I wouldn’t put anything that adds to the disk workloads like zfs, but maybe I am wrong.

Speed wise, I was able to stream movies without any hiccups, and that’s plenty I think.

Do not cheap out on the enclosures. Cheap ones will last 1 month, I don’t kid you.

And keep them cool… Fan… Air circulation… USB controllers will be killed faster than mechanical disks by heat. And 24/7 will generate heat… Those enclosures are not built for that…

Again, it’s pretty doable and I did it for almost 2 decades. DONT BE CHEAP ON ENCLOSURES (did I say so already?) And you should be fine.

If you don’t want to use postgresql for some obscure reason use MariaDB real open source MySQL drop in replacement.

This.

That’s why temping obscurity for security is not a good idea. Doesn’t take much to be “safe”, at least reasonably safe. But that not much its good practice to be done :)