OP asks about HDD technology, and somehow you found a way to ignore the main ask of their question, AND offer a response including a discussion about a hypothetical home renovation.

“I see you want to know X, but I know about construction, so how about Z or Q? Eh?”

Bravo.

OP, WD Red NAS drives are usually 5400 with low cache and go at least up to 10TB. Might have to buy soon, as I don’t see much new stock.

Well as long as you’re aware of the risk and prepared for it, its not so bad to run in a volatile way like that. I ran my TN box for almost a decade on the same USB boot before I finally caved and picked up three Intel enterprise SSD for the job, with one as a cold spare. Nothing in the vox was critical or would be missed for more than a few beers of crying.

Thats is a very budget-friendly choice for UnRAID to accept varying drive sizes. As a backup destination, especially a cold backup, the RAM requirements of ZFS should be less impactful. I had lots of use from my TrueNAS box with 16GB, and my dedicated cold backup build is just 8GB on 5x1TB WD Blue (gasp!) HDDs. I always wanted to try other NAS platforms, but I’m away from all my tech for a few years.

Obligatory "TrueNAS is free " comment

Yes! I imported 23k media files into a new platform, and the takeout process was such a pain. My destination was built to handle the zipped or unzipped media, but occasionally issues cropped up,like when files spanned archives but the json was on the previous one. That resulted in orphaned files with upload dates instead of date taken.

Ultimately, I think I had the best experience extracting all 123GB and uploading the albums/folders that way.

Would have been SO much easier with an API that allowed cloud to cloud.

Bab’s house?

I recently adopted ente, and while the devs are active and enthusiastic, feature parity with gphotos is a long way off. IMO, the sub price should be half what it is.

The desktop app (the only practical/supported way to import your Google Takeout) has lots of little bugs and problems, not least of which is 100% CPU load for the the first few weeks you have it installed. Thats because (even after initial encryption and upload is complete) the machine learning and indexing (even the basic, opted out version) hobbles your system with aggressive CPU scheduling.

I’m going to stick it out for a second month, but I’m not without regrets. For me, I was just done feeding Google AI with my photos and wanted privacy first.

If you’re running TrueNAS, the replication feature was the smoothest and easiest way to move large amounts of data when I did it 18 months back. Once the destination location was accessible from the sending host, it was as simple as kicking off a snapshot, resulting in a fully usable replica on the receiving host. IIRC, IXsystems staff told me rsync can be problematic compared to the replication/snapshot system, as permissions and other metadata can be lost.

I liked fog a few years back