Published Oct 26, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

Korbin is a Linux system administrator who spends most of his time in a terminal figuring out how things actually work. Over the last decade he's written hundreds of articles about Linux configuration, troubleshooting weird problems, and using open-source tools in the real world.

He also works a lot with Windows systems and networking, especially in mixed environments where things don't always behave the way the documentation says they should. Writing things down is how he makes sense of it all and hopefully saves someone else a few hours.

When it comes to a NAS system, I've always been told it's best practice to use hard drives of the same size. Even better if they're the same manufacturer and model. That advice made sense at first, since you could expect consistent reliability and behavior across the whole batch of drives .

The opportunity to build a NAS that way never came to me.…