hey @Brandon Lee sent you dm should i post my questions here instead? you mentioned in my welcome message if i needed any help to respond there

I read an article and have seen it confirmed I think on Wired that the US Commerce Department along with several other US Government agencies have recommended that the US ban the sale of TP-Link routers in the US. The consensus for this is that TP-Link USA (a separate company) is beholden to their previous owner TP-Link China and that the Chinese government holds sway over them. With this and the popularity of TP-Link routers in the US (reportedly upward of 50% of US home/SoHo routers in the US are TP-Link) these other agencies feel like the Chinese government would have too much possible access to sensitive US data. With that said I really don't want this post to be some sort of political tit for tat discussion. I have recently become heavily invested in TP-Link products. I have two of their switches within the last 3 months and 3 of the AP's within the last year, along with running the Omada software controller to administer these devices. I also have over 40 TP-Link WiFi smart switches, outlets, and multi-outlet strips. I consulted with Gemini :>) and per its research the reported problems with TP-Link products are no more and really no less than other manufacturers (Netgear and LinkSys). So it is really a matter of whether the Chinese government could gain access to US data. Again with that said my questions become do I believe that this could happen (government access), what is my exposure, and do I really consider replacing all these products if TP-Link and their products are banned from this country? What do you all think?

Diving into nas setups as a noob I was leaning towards a 4 bay nas with RAID 10 due to its performance and fault tolerance. Learning about proper backup practice I will probably have to keep forking out for cloud storage anyway as an off site back up. Getting the same amount of storage form RAID 5 would keep setup costs down but many post advise against it for HDD over 1TB in size. Any thoughts ?

Thoughts on going with refurbished hard drives for a nas/media server to keep the cost down ? I see shucking was a popular strategy but does not seem to make sense with the current prices. Any reccommendations on the best places to buy refurbished drives ?

Hello all, I have an old full-size ATX case that was once a gaming/general use computer. It had an Intel mobo and first generation I7-920 CPU. It has died. I would like to take this giant case that has lots of hard drive space and turn it into a NAS with TrueNAS. I'm planning to use it to hold all my VM disks. Wondering if anyone has done similar and can suggest a decent mobo,cpu, etc for this purpose. Preferably something that won't break the bank.