Thanks! There are a couple parts of this that have spin-off potential... it's now done "enough" to be useful here, and I'm turning my attention to that. Hopefully not too impractical (I haven't actually tried to move it yet, more than about a foot away from the wall...)

Hi -- Steve here (who built that contraption). Good question -- I also have 180TB of Synology NAS in my main lab rack (big noisy beast, but a solid machine). It is all integrated with business and other stuff, not at all portable... and if I decided to leave it would be so daunting to disassemble that it would probably just end up in boxes for months.

Part of the motive for this was to get my personal stuff (not movies, client projects, or other large things) into a single object that I can theoretically move myself, in the process not breaking things. That is really liberating, and ended up encouraging Immich of my whole photo and video history, along with other archiving and tool-aggregation.

It is slightly insane, admittedly, but is a mix of personal information kit and passion project. A last hurrah for this old technomad, in a way.

Being mobile, affordable, while being DIYable? PoC? Nothing in there seems like the storage couldn't be exchangable for whatever is at hand, be it 'salvage', or brand new shiny SSDs if there are enough funds.

Whatever. I liked it.