I’d be willing to risk it all for the pi.

That may be true, but I have had nothing but reliability from mine. Hell, there was one with a broken plastic SATA pin support and bent pins, and that thing still worked and tested fine for 3 more years.

As with all things, results may vary, but if you have a decent backup of your most important files, they are still the best bang for your buck to get a huge amount of storage, imo.

Moving your files back and forth should be no problem, especially if you have a decent router. Local networks are freaky fast these days, and are often only limited by the read/write speed of your disk.

It’s so easy that you’ll never go back. There are options depending on what you want to do too. I primarily store entertainment media, so I ran a simple Ubuntu Server for years with cockpit installed so I could easily mount and manage drives and PLEX to serve the media. It got me hooked, and worked flawlessly.

I have since become more ambitious and run ProxMox with an Open Media Vault VM to serve the media through NFS to other VM’s. My experience with Open Media Vault has been that it is a bit more complicated than my previous setup, but has resulted in a lot more flexibility with how I can access the data from multiple computers.

I will warn you though that the collecting can get addicting. It’s always easy to justify adding just one more drive to the system, and they get cheaper and bigger every year.

Dude, all those cloud services are tough to get data out of. That’s why a lot of them charge an arm and a leg to have it mailed to you on physical media.

If those disks are the big plastic WD externals, they can be easily shucked and used in a NAS—much cheaper than buying the bare drives without the casing for reasons known only to WD. I have 80+ TB across 5 shucked drives, and the oldest has worked perfectly for over 6 years of heavy 24/7 use.

It feels like you answered your own question—a second server comes with advantages and sounds like it isn’t a significant increase in price.