iATKOS | United Kingdom

Hey guys,

So I've been running my dual boot win10/Mojave build for a year now, using a z390 Designare mobo. My storage setup currently consists of:

• 2 m.2 nvme's (one for each os)
• 4 sata HDD's in the remaining internal connections (mobo has 6 sata ports but disables 2 of them when you set it up to use 2 m.2 ssd's)
• 1 pcie sata expansion card for the remaining hdd

Bear in mind that apart from the main os drives that have no need for communication/file transfer between them, I work on stuff that is cross-platform a lot of times, so I have to open the same projects from both win10 and macOS. So I've opted to keep my storage drives as NTFS so windows can access them natively and have been using NTFS for Mac to be able to write to them from the mac side.

Currently it's really not an ideal solution for a few reasons

I cannot get macOS to recognize the hdd connected to the pcie expansion card, so I've been having to use that for non-essential storage (yes that probably could be solved by either replacing the card with a compatible one or major troubleshooting as to why it doesn't appear)

I have limited options when it comes to expandability, given that even with a decent pcie sata card I might be close to hitting my pci lane limit. Not to mention the clutter of hard drives in my case.

And finally (and maybe most importantly) I have no redundancy. Apart from backing up the important stuff to more than two of the hard drives, that's it.

So, I was looking into maybe getting a small NAS to connect directly to my secondary ethernet port, so I can avoid using my router (which is good enough for my internet connection but don't know how well it could handle file transfers) given that I'm only planning to use this thing with one physical machine. My understanding is that a mapped network drive can be accessed and used by both OS's natively, so a neater solution on that front as well, plus the redundancy added by some sort of raid setup

My question is kinda vague but is the NAS solution slightly overkill? Is there another solution that I'm failing to consider? Maybe some sort of USB box that can provide a similar solution or something else entirely?

Sorry if this is not fully on-topic for this sub, but I'd rather take opinions from you guys that already have the limitations of hackintoshes in mind.

TL:DR Dual Boot win10/mojave needs nas or similar os-agnostic external storage solution