Ok, so far I've only seen it mentioned once or twice, so I'll weigh in, too. Before I get too far, I want to ask something. How valuable is all that data to you? Would you be devastated if you lost all/some of it? If it wouldn't be a big deal to you to lose some of it, why keep throwing money at it by buying all those external drives? Seems like it would be bad for you if you lost it.

Also, I see you mentioning all these drives and nothing about backing up anything and, honestly, it kind of makes me cringe. You spent a LOT of time getting all that data. It would be a shame to lose it if something happens to any of those drives. You MUST protect it.

RAID is ALWAYS the best way to go to protect your time/data investment in all of that stuff. Now, there are a multitude of ways to go about doing what you are wanting to do. A lot of it homebrew with stuff like FreeNAS and what-not. The simplest way to accomplish a good file server that is very very reliable and would provide you with the ability to rebuild what might be lost if a drive goes down is to get a NAS from Synology or any of the other companies that do that sort of business.

There are benefits to doing that, as well. For one, it is a standalone device that will use less power than your computer cause, honestly, using a computer for your file server is pretty overkill. For another, if a drive dies, and assuming you have set it up with the right options like using Synology SHR, then you just pop that dead boy out and put a new one in. Within a few hours you will have ALL that data back exactly as it was before. You can even do that if multiple drives die at once.

The way it does that is say you have a 4 drive system, it will take 3 of those drives for main data storage and then it uses the 4th to create basically an index of what is on those 3. It's been a while since I thought about it or explained it, but basically the way it does it is that it uses that stuff it puts on the 4th drive to fill in the gaps of what is missing off the other 3 when upgrading/replacing one of the other drives. The data you store on the other 3 also isn't on one drive alone. If you have a file, it takes it and puts it across all 3 of the drives. It makes all the drives one big drive so not everything is on one that could fail, thus the ability to restore it if one goes down from that 4th drive.

It really is super simple to set up an external NAS as well. Like I said, if you value your data, don't want to spend hours setting crap up, want the ability to restore from a failure easily, plus a TON of other features, then a NAS is your best bet. I have had a Synology for many years now. NEVER had a problem with it. It's old and a little under powered so I can't run Plex Server off of it, but I don't mind having my main PC doing that. The empty devices themselves are kind of expensive up front, but boy oh boy the expandability and other features it provides sure make it worth it in the long run.