Using 2 expansion cards isn’t an option ??
I mean how often do you access a lot of the data, can it be split ?
possibly. would like to avoid that
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Does it really have to be a separate physical drive? Partition on a bigger drive won’t work?
A 2 or 4tb m.2 drive is likely going to be cheaper than os drive + 2 1tb expansion cards and will perform better (both on performance and power efficiency).
If like me I want my personal stuff removable and usable elsewhere 
Perhaps some other external solution?
Heat is an issue, keeping the memory alive all the time, the bigger the memory the greater to watts needed. From 2W to 3W in a small enclosure is a lot.
I dismantled my 256G and put 2mm of thermal strip to ‘connect’ the chip to the aluminium case but it didn’t help much, if at all. So in this case it was the expansion card slot maybe . . .
etc.
I have an ongoing official support hanging . . .
yikes, those are some problems. Hmm. Maybe i should just stick with making 2 partitions…
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Unless you have a very good reason not to this would be cheaper, easier, higher performance and more efficient.
Pretty much the only pro of the expansion card route is removability, if you don’t need that partition the way to go.
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You can also just plug in an external nvme drive directly to the usb port. Some of the external cases have really good thermal solutions so that may give you enough performance
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I can shed some light on that. After the thread was closed I contacted support, and after going through several steps (including applying a thermal pad) they determined the card was defective and told me to buy a new one.
The thermal pad did not improve the issue at all.
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Could also slap one of those fancy 8tb m.2 ones into an enclosure, then you have an 8tb one for the low low price of an arm and a leg XD
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get a NAS, install tailscale on the NAS and the laptop. much more reliable.
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was trying to avoid it.
might be coming to that point tho
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more than half of the advice you received here is more expensive than a 2-bay nas + 2x8TB drives. if you then install tailscale you can connect to it from everywhere and you’d be only bound to the limits of your connection. plus of course you get redundancy and a lot of other usefull stuff.
fyi: the reason why i moved to this solution is that i had a 2TB usb hard drive which broke and i lost all the data.
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Decent ish 2tb m.2 ssds got really really cheap lately.
But yeah would not want to imagine living without a nas at this point.
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one of the posts above shows 350 usd for a 4TB drive. a 2-bay nas + 2x 4TB drives is more or less that amount of money. doubling the capacity it starts being worth it.
Only if you actually need the double capacity, you pay for with them being orders of magnitude slower and less portable. It’s all tradeofs.
If partition on a 2tb drive works, that is a no brainier and by far the best solution available imo.
If there are actually 2tb dedicated to the secondary required I’d much rather go with the shittiest dramless 4tb drive I can find (there are sub 200$ ones) than move back to HDDs.
If you actually have any other use for the nas, getting a nas in general would be the way to go if you can live with only having acces to your 2tb of files when you have internet and only at your upload speed.
Buying 4tb hdds these days really isn’t worth it, especially since that size segment is still littered with unmarked smr drives.
But anyway the actual best solution highly depends on use case and that really was not explained so all we can do is provide options.
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airplanes
third world countries
for backpackers like me, the internet is sporadic
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SSD it is then, please do backups though.