Self-hosters' weekend: turning your home NAS into a Windows drive letter in 30 minutes

The setup I have at home

• Old PC with 4×4TB drives, running TrueNAS Scale (could be Unraid, OpenMediaVault, or Synology — same idea)
• Nextcloud for calendar / contacts / file sync (because I don't want to give Google more reasons to profile me)
• Random WebDAV shares from Aliyun and a couple of VPS instances for backups

For years I've been opening each one separately — Nextcloud client on my laptop, AliyunDrive web tab, Cyberduck for the VPS. It's fine. It's just friction.

What changed

About a month ago I tried ScsDriver ($1.99/mo or $9.99/yr, currently running a 7-day-trial-with-referrals promotion). It mounts WebDAV / Nextcloud / Aliyun / Google Drive / OneDrive as a real Windows drive letter. So:

• Nextcloud on my home NAS → E: drive
• Aliyun webdav → F: drive
• VPS WebDAV (backup target) → G: drive
• Google Drive (occasional file sharing) → H: drive

Each shows up in Windows Explorer like a real local volume. I open E:photos in File Explorer and the photos are right there. VSCode opens the project on E: directly. Total Commander lets me drag files between F: and G: without any sync step.

The 30-minute weekend

If you already have a WebDAV share, the setup is genuinely small:

1. Install ScsDriver on your Windows machine (5 min)
2. Click "Add mount", paste your WebDAV URL, set credentials (5 min)
3. Pick a drive letter, save (1 min)
4. Repeat for each WebDAV source (5 min each)
5. Stress-test with a large directory (10 min) — for me, that surfaced a Windows 11 24H2 issue they patched in the next release
6. Done. Open Explorer.

What's not great

I'm going to be honest about the rough edges:

• No Linux / macOS client. If you split time between OSes, this is Windows-only. I haven't noticed because my daily driver is Windows, but it's a real gap.
• The installer asks you to log in. This is fine for the trial model, but if you're the kind of person who refuses to make an account for a desktop app, this is friction. (A license-key variant would be nice.)
• The first directory enumeration on a 50k+ file directory is still slow. The UI doesn't freeze anymore (the 24H2 fix), but the data still has to come over the network. Don't expect SSD speeds on first list.

The trial pricing thing

The 7-day trial + referral-extended model caught me off guard at first. I thought it would be a marketing gimmick, but it's actually pleasant:

• I tried it for 7 days
• I told two friends about it (one who's been complaining about RaiDrive's price, one who's setting up home NAS for the first time)
• They both signed up with my invite link
• My trial extended by 14 days, so I had 21 days total to evaluate
• That was enough time to fully integrate it into my workflow
• I paid the $9.99/year at the end — which is roughly the cost of two months of RaiDrive Individual

For hobby projects, that kind of "social trial" is great. You don't have to commit up front.

Is this right for your home NAS?

If your daily driver is Windows and you keep files across multiple WebDAV sources, yes. If you live in macOS or Linux, wait for those clients. If you only have one source and rarely touch it from Explorer, the desktop client might be enough.

For me, the killer feature was just "one Explorer window for everything." It sounds small. After a month, it's the only way I want to access my home server.