8gb is bare minimum for ZFS. 32gb would be great. ZFS will use all of it.
I would use a minimum of 3 drives because then it is easy to expand later (opposed to starting with 1 or 2).
You could start with the 16tb drives if you want. Personally I like to save power and every spinning drive takes 5-15 watts of power.
What do you mean the addresses are private? Are you double NAT-ed?
As others have mentioned, tailscale or Cloudflare tunnels can solve your problem
Do you care about power consumption?
If not, grab a used Xeon workstation off eBay or Facebook. Grab a pci HBA card and you are set. Note that TrueNas needs lots of ram.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to pay power for an empty drive, so I’d setup the 3 12x drives in a zfs pool and store/sell the 16g drives until you actually need them.
CasaOS is about as easy as it gets.
curl -fsSL https://get.casaos.io | sudo bash
It provides a gui front end for docker. You can install it on any debian based system (which mint is). Combine that with the portainer app and there isn’t much you can’t do.
All the major NAS brands have a google cloud sync (synology/QNAP/asusstor/casaos)
Owncloud/Nextcloud have a google drive sync plugin
You could use something like rsync to copy to another cloud or drive.
Or proxmox and then you can run one or the other or both virtually.
This video by Wolfgang has tons of good information on finding a good low power cpu.
There is a google sheet pinned at the top where people have real world power measurements.
Basically you want to find a low TDP cpu/motherboard combo.
Why not both?
I run CasaOS inside Proxmox
You could add more with a usb/thunderbolt/sas jbod expansion.
Buy a bigger unit, transfer the drives and sell the old one
Clustering/hyperconverged with truenas or ceph
Instead of 3 small drives, why not go for 2 larger drives. You are sort of fighting 2 constraints. That case isn’t meant for 3 drives.
Also I really think you will regret the usb. You could get a pci to SATA connector and put 1 or 2 drives inside the case.
If power efficiency is important, then you will want to look for CPUs with low TDP.
I reccomend this video by Wolfgang
Or this one by hardware haven
They go into depth on low power home servers.
Something like this?
Obviously this is make for ripping DVD/Blu-Rays, but combined with software like Automatic Ripping Machine, I feel confident that you could automate 90% of this. (Still would need to put disks in, and rename any folders that were created).
Based on the fact that you are dealing with medical files, you likely have HIPPA hoops to jump through, so using a unmanaged second computer might be out of the question. (As an it administrator I would not allow a raspberry pi or similar access to the VPN/Network). You may have luck asking IT for a second computer (that they control), and then do the USB drive option.
Assuming you have unlimited power and noise tolerance
I would start with a used dell 720xd for $350 and then fill it up with drives. If you need more add jbods
CasaOS can mix and match, but it uses mergerFS which doesn’t have the same parity as ZFS/ceph/raid.
Im also a big fan of CasaOS and run it. You should also check out ZimaOS alpha release as it has more raid functionality.
ZFS needs roughly 1GB of ram per TB of storage.
Truenas code is older and runs on BSD. 99% of people will want to run Scale.
What’s your budget?
For a very clean professional look and future proofing I would add smurf tube behind the drywall and add a media enclosure
Unraid- if your drives are different sizes. Truenas - if you have lots of ram and like ZFS. CasaOs - If you like pretty things. Proxmox + Open Media Vault - If you want to run vms.
Completely False? No known 3.5 external that isn’t normal inside?
You sure about that?
What about these drives that have a USB interface instead of SATA.
I have that exact terramaster for sale. It would work with smb/nfs/iscsi.
Other options using your existing hardware.
Port forwarding will work, but it has major downsides
There are far better and safer alternatives that I would recommend over exposing a raw port to the world.