I was thinking it would be nice to have for backups, but maybe even going as far as mounting ~/home to be able to run from multiple machines. I’m really asking where to get started looking without crashing into marketing department nonsense and search engine steering bias.
https://www.gl-inet.com/ makes routers that have OpenWRT pre-installed and you can generally connect an external drive via USB3 and make that available on your network.
OpenWRT support on GL.inet devices seems to be complex. The following is my understanding of the situation.
GL.inet have an OpenWRT fork on GitHub https://github.com/gl-inet/openwrt This is what is installed on GL.inet devices.
The OpenWRT developers in due course try to work out how to port mainline OpenWRT onto OpenWRT onto GL.inet devices.
Yes. My experience with the gl-inet device I have was that initially the fork was good enough and when the company didn’t update it much anymore, it was very easy to reflash the device to a main-line OpenWRT version. It’s now working great with the latest mainline version despite being quite old already.