I have purchased an Asustor 4-bay NAS with 2 network ports. The initial urge is to serve files directly to my old computer (Win 3.1, Win 98, and Win XP on separate HDDs) through SMB 1 with one dedicated net port. Now I know that SMB1 is a security vulnerability, but seeing as that physical port should be inaccessible to anything remote, and inaccessible to the wider internet, I am not super concerned.

What I am concerned with, however, is how to logically separate everything so that it makes sense. In addition to serving disc/disk images and having a place to store tons of backups of autoexecs, configuration files and drivers, I want to use the NAS for more modern things, like serving video/audio to a few devices, and storing a giant bank of roms and images to a modern computer, a Sega Saturn, possibly a PS2, and eventually a couple of MiSTers.

I think what I'm getting most confused about is separating logical volumes vs sharing different folders as drives. What would be the downside of having a massive volume and just separating it all into various folders, which then get assigned drive letters (and physical ports) if need be? Vs of course splitting the entire pool into volumes depending on usage.

Looking forward to any/all recommendations.

PS - I'm going to leave the entire NAS off the internet for the time being, seeing as a ton of ransomware attacks are active (as of this posting), so most of the data will be filtered through the windows security on my modern desktop.