I Need to Think About Replacing My NAS, but...

I've an old NAS. It's a Buffalo TeraStation1400D with 12 TB of drive space.

I'd been using it to store snapshot backups of my Macs.  I recently bought a couple of new Mac systems and wanted to leverage the NAS a bit more and found that the NAS needs some legacy things that Apple is getting rid of very soon, so Time Machine will no longer work with my NAS.

I bought the TS1400D back in 2017 - hard to believe that was nine years ago!  It wasn't exactly cheap, either (a bit over $600).  At some point, I need to think about replacing my NAS, but this is a bad time to buy such things, as the prices of drives and memory are astoundingly high.

For now, the NAS will still work but I won't be able to use it with Time Machine.  I can get basic with this - buy an external drive enclosure to use with several largish HDDs that I have.  That'll get me by for a short while.  I just want to be able to back up at least one of my new Macs - both have 1 TB drives.  

I've functional spare 2 TB and 1 TB HDD drives.  I bought a 2 bay enclosure.  The plan is to put both in the enclosure.  Eventually, I'll find another 2 TB drive and swap out the 1TB drive - that way I may be able to configure them using RAID (the enclosure supports RAID).

I've a 2-bay drive dock but it's only supposed to be used for duplicating drives and acessing them for non-permanent tasks.  I frequently lose connectivity with that dock when using them with my Mini - I'm thinking maybe it's saturating the USB 3.0 connection when I use it.  Hopefully, I won't run into the same issue with the new enclosure.

We'll see how well the new drive works.

UPDATE (5/14/2026):  Both the 1-TB and 2-TB drives are bad.  This is sad situation.  I've two 500GB SSDs that I plan to set to RAID0 - Right now, I've a 500GB SSD and a 750 GB HDD in the 2-bay enclosure.  It works well!

UPDATE (5/16/2026):  I went ahead and bought a 4-TB HDD, specifically for Time Machine backups.  Why no SSD?  1) because they're super expensive right now, and, 2) because for TM backups, a mechanical drive will suffice...I don't need speed for backups.  I was surprised that I could find a new one for a decent price (Seagate, from Seagate, for $140).  It'll be here tomorrow.

UPDATE (6/17/2026):  I've been using the Seagate 4-TB HDD the past 30 days now.  It's working.  It's been uneventful, which is good.  It fit into the 2 bay enclosure without issue and I was immediately able to format the drive and use it.  I've a 750 GB HDD in the 2nd bay for regular file storage, too.  Eventually, I'll buy another 4-TB HDD to replace the 750 GB drive.