I’m a bit consistently annoyed with the sporadic HDD performance in my NAS (SMR drives…) where the write speed varies largely, even with 8 drives and barely pushes past 100MB/s. I’m also tired of having to replace drives every so often, even though my workload is mostly write-once read-many. I also have been living the low power laptop-only life for a while now, and would like to get back into gaming more.
I’m thinking of rebuilding my NAS with SATA SSDs, in a nice compact case that will have space for a GPU so once those aren’t crazy in price, I can install it and use it in a KVM VM with PCIe passthrough.
Am I crazy for pursuing this? My parts list thus far is below.
Motherboard: ASRock Rack > X570D4I-2T
CPU: AMD 3600
RAM: 4x 32GB ECC SODIMM (128GB)
Case: Fractal Design Core 500 Black Mini-ITX Small Form Factor Computer Case - Newegg.com
Boot SSD - partially allocated for a Windows gaming VM: https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Internal-Maximum-Performance-SB-RKTQ4-4TB/dp/B08D29JQ24?th=1
NAS SSD Cage: ICY DOCK ToughArmor MB998IP-B Rugged Full Metal 8 Bay 2.5" SAS/SATA SSD&HDD (7mm) Backplane Cage for External 5.25" Bay - Newegg.com
NAS SSDs: 8x Crucial BX 2TB
Extra Cables: 2x Oculink 4i to mini-SAS cables
GPU: ??? 3070 maybe when they’re affordable