They do sell appliances though, but I had a lot of parts laying around, so I used them instead of buying an appliance.

@CochranRobotics -

Thanks for the info on NextCloud. Despite my distrust of the cloud, NextCloud appears to be a safer and more private way than port forwarding to access my files remotely. Especially since port forwarding is above my comprehension level, and I'm sure I'd set it so my server was public rather than private.

Now, that brings us back to what a good, cheap, robust laptop (10" - 13") might be good for my robotics work. While I'm not afraid to go under the hood to make modifications, I'd just as soon not have to replace a motherboard, etc. Guess I'm looking for instant gratification.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-XPS-13-Ultrabook-13-inch-Black-Laptop-Notebook-/322493559481?epid=1810142929&hash=item4b161d32b9:g:HfYAAOSw4A5Y2Az4

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Asus-13-inch-laptop-Q302L-/122558775274?hash=item1c89127fea:g:aFcAAOSwGJlZJeNG - Ends in 13 minutes

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ASUS-Q302LA-BBI5T14-256GB-Intel-Core-i5-4th-Gen-1-7GHz-8GB/252961674988?_trksid=p2047675.c100009.m1982&_trkparms=aid%3D888007%26algo%3DDISC.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D44732%26meid%3De88d6c7a6a3b4c8c8af9519ccb447a9f%26pid%3D100009%26rk%3D2%26rkt%3D2%26sd%3D122558775274

Here is another of the Asus Q-302's. If you go with that model, just make sure that you are buying the I5 version and not the I3 version.

One more thing on the NAS RAID setup.

In the hardware physical configuration, it is important to make sure that the sata controllers are not all setup to go to the same drive in each set. This is because if you have drive 1 from each set going to a sata controller, and your controller goes down, you will need to perform a recovery that is more extensive.

There are two decent options.
Option 1... Controller 1 disk 0 set 0 disk 1 set 0 disk 2 set 0 disk 3 set 0 If the sata controller goes out, you will loose the raid 10 but because it is mirrored, you will be able to recover and be able to run in a degradated mode until the issue is resolved.

Option 2... Controller 1 disk 0 set 0 disk 1 set 1 disk 2 set 2 disk 3 set 3 If the sata controller goes out, you will still be able to recover due to the redundancy built in and may not be able to run in a degradated mode very well, but it should work.

bad configuration controller 1 disk 0 set 0 disk 0 set 1 disk 0 set 2 disk 0 set 3 If the sata controller goes out, you will have a downed environment that will need hardware replacement and then a recovery. Don't do this. It will probably require you to do a resilver and then a restore from backup.

I opted for option 1 as it still leaves 3 copies of the data available to use and still provides a raid 10 config for redundancy until the controller is replaced. I simply run in a degradated mode until I can do this repair, and the external drive is still able to be used for backups.

Thanks much! I'm on the trail!