Personally I deal with it by prioritizing the data.

I have about the same total size Unraid NAS as you, but the vast majority is downloaded or ripped media that would be annoying to replace, but not disastrous.

My personal photos, videos and other documents which are irreplaceable only make up a few TB, which is pretty managable to maintain true local and cloud backups of.

Not sure if that helps at all in your situation.

Thanks, I didn’t realize the enterprise DASs could be locked down to certain drive models. That would definitely be a non-starter.

The only thing to watch out for using a laptop that is plugged in 24x7 is the battery. Battery management systems are generally pretty good, but Li-ion batteries can fail catastrophically. As long as you make a point to check on it periodically it’s probably fine.

I’m using an old laptop as a local interface for my network setup, since its in my basement, and I actually pulled the battery out entirely since I have a beefy UPS powering everything. Paranoid, maybe, but a Li-ion battery sitting on top of my equipment rack could do a ton of damage if it were to fail someday.