I’ve never used anything that’s everything proof but I have a favorite on Amazon. This one has a power supply built in (no power bricks hogging the power strip). It has a physical on/off switch and uses simple USB cables. No downsides whatsoever, and after I bought one, I only buy these from now on.
“External Hard Drive Enclosure VSVABEFV” search that on Amazon.
They say they support up to 8 TB but I’ve gotten 16 TB drives to work.
I keep it simple. Album Artist\Album. I also have a compilation category (stuff like “Various Artists” or “100 relaxing background music”). I tried going more detailed in the past and it became too cumbersome to manage, and software like WinAMP would read the tags and organize how they liked it anyway.
Instead of selling it like other people suggested, leave it unplugged and wait a few years.
SSDs will continue to get cheaper and eventually reach price parity with hard drives. So you could load it with SSDs and it would be even faster and more powerful but draw less power.
The problem with recording videos is you will accumulate data significantly faster than you will be able to edit/render them.
Your hoard size is 100% guaranteed to be a bigger problem than how good of a NAS setup you have. If you don’t want to spend money on a really fast NAS, you can just load whatever files you’re working on to your SSD and delete the copies after you finish rendering.
I delete most of my raw video files after rendering because, again, the size of my data is unaffordable.
I would find this useful. I donate to an NGO in Bangladesh and people in the country are technologically illiterate. Their English education is also useless because students who go to English speaking schools can’t have a basic conversation with foreigners. I can put this stuff on cheap $30 tablets and take a bunch with me the next time I go.
If you have thousands of small files, maybe put them into the zip folders with store compression. A small number of large files read and write a lot faster than a lot of small files.