What’s so WTF about it? I’m repurposing old hardware and testing out the concept. I’m not shelling out a pile of cash on something that might not work for me.

These are internal drives connected to a desktop PSU wired to a USB interface to connect to the laptop.

Haha, yeah. It does make me wonder whether I should bin the whole TrueNAS approach entirely. It seems like a tremendous faff when I could just have the files mirrored to another disk as a backup.

The hard disks are on a separate power supply. The TrueNAS software is running on an old laptop so it effectively has UPS protection.