Question Dual NAS question (pet project)

[toddthecat]

[Moderator Note: Moving thread from Networking to Storage. More applicable category.]

Apologies if asked/answered somewhere else, delete if not allowed.

I have a ton of old hardware collected from various things that I like to just tinker around with. I've got an old Thinkcentre M83 and stack of random 2.5" HDDs ranging 20-240GB. I want to do a fun little NAS build out of it, JBOD the drives, and link it into the home network to see how well it would perform hosting as a media server compared to my existing Synology DS220+, just for the fun of it. Not concerned regarding efficiency, long term viability, volatility of old drives, etc. This is just screwing around, so criticisms aside, can anyone answer the following?

• I'd like to use Xpenology for the build for two reasons, first is that I like DSM, the second being that I'm curious if the two could co-exist. I would (obviously) not put my legitimate Synology creds into the Xpen build as I don't want my account blocked or my DS220+ bricked. I have no intent to open the build to the web. When fired up on the network, would DSM on Synology give automatic recognition that another DSM OS had joined and go into conflict? If so, would using a different version be a safeguard?
• If no confliction, I'd just map the JBOD network drive on a few machines and dump old, non-important, non-mission critical stuff on it I suppose and also see how it would do with some random ripped media. It would be only on when used, off otherwise to increase longevity.
• The curious part of me wonders, if the Xpen is built out and then introduced to the network and they can co-exist, can it be safely taken a step further in that I could manually add the Xpen build to the Synology Central Management System as the second Synology device it thinks it is?

I mean, I bought the DS220+ recently, legitimately, brand new, so this isn't an effort to circumvent paying for a product/service completely. Rather, I'd just like to integrate into the network hardware that is not supported or recommended to be used in this fashion. We're talking about 15+ year old drives and a 12ish year old machine. Drives are likely to fail at any time (though I have run them through write all 0s wipes, done surface scans, speed tests, and they seem to be in good shape) and I'm not going to spend the sort of money for a 4 or 6 bay enclosure for a non-important hobby build. This is going to be called FrankenNAS. I'm more curious to see how long it will live in reanimation lol. Integrating into the existing Synology CSM would just be the cherry on top. If it won't work, I'll just FreeNAS the thing and map the network drive as I don't see that causing confliction between the two, but I don't want to be missing something there and be horribly wrong...

Thanks!