There's no danger in filling it up, it's just 1s and 0s!
They don't always make noise before dying but if you don't leave them running full time that should help - just handle them carefully. I've known people who kept drives in safes and noticed that they had a high failure rate - opening and closing the safe drawer would bang the drive aorund pretty good even though it wasn't spinning.:bang:
If you're going to a Microcenter you may be near me actually as there aren't many and there's one near me. You will not find unRAID NAS there though. unRAID is pretty much a build yourself solution although they do also sell them built. If you build yourself you can do it piecemeal slowly and buy drives as needed. They have a free version of the software that can handle three drives with one being parity - so to data drives. Is good for seeing if some old junk machine laying around will run the software and to get used to using it etc.. If you are comfortable building computers this is a good way to go. Check out their forums to learn more.
There are other ways to do this with other software - free and otherwise. Software like FreeNAS and others can be used with various hardware to build network storage systems similar to mine. Lots of pros and cons to all of the various ways to do it, unRAID is just the one I'm most comfortable with so you will want to research other solutions too I'm sure. Honestly I've not seen many store bought solutions that are as flexible or as affordable as rolling your own. <shrug>
They don't always make noise before dying but if you don't leave them running full time that should help - just handle them carefully. I've known people who kept drives in safes and noticed that they had a high failure rate - opening and closing the safe drawer would bang the drive aorund pretty good even though it wasn't spinning.:bang:
If you're going to a Microcenter you may be near me actually as there aren't many and there's one near me. You will not find unRAID NAS there though. unRAID is pretty much a build yourself solution although they do also sell them built. If you build yourself you can do it piecemeal slowly and buy drives as needed. They have a free version of the software that can handle three drives with one being parity - so to data drives. Is good for seeing if some old junk machine laying around will run the software and to get used to using it etc.. If you are comfortable building computers this is a good way to go. Check out their forums to learn more.
There are other ways to do this with other software - free and otherwise. Software like FreeNAS and others can be used with various hardware to build network storage systems similar to mine. Lots of pros and cons to all of the various ways to do it, unRAID is just the one I'm most comfortable with so you will want to research other solutions too I'm sure. Honestly I've not seen many store bought solutions that are as flexible or as affordable as rolling your own. <shrug>
