I had a similar case.
My minipc has a microSD card slot and I figured if it could be done for a RPI, why not for a mini PC? :P
After a few months I bought a new m2nvme but I didn’t want to start from scratch (maybe I should’ve looked into nix?)
So what I did was sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=1024k status=progress
And that worked perfectly!
Things to note:
- both drives need to be unmounted, so you need a live OS or another machine.
- The new drive will have the same exact partitions, which means the same size, so you need to expand them after the copy.
- PS: this was for a drive with ext4 partitions, but in theory dd works with the bytes so it shouldn’t be an issue what fs you use.
Why do you need the files in your local?
Is your network that slow?
I’ve heard of multiple content creators which have their video files in their NAS to share between their editors, and they work directly from the NAS.
Could you do the same? You’ll be working with music, so the network traffic will be lower than with video.
If you do this you just need a way to mount the external directory, either with rclone or with sshfs.
I think this is a good strategy to not put additional stress in your drives (as a non-expert of NAS), but I’ve read the actual wear and tear of the drives is mostly during this process of spinning up and down. That’s why NAS drives should be kept spinning all the time.
And drives specifically built for NAS setups are designed with this in mind.