Do you really need a PC as a NAS for the price of 1500? I understand that you want to use hdd you already have? How much CPU power do you require?
I quite often recommend Odroid HC2 and one very large HDD for small purposes, just for such purposes as backup and file sharing in lan up to 1Gb/s.
It is a compact solution, quiet and energy-saving. But of course it has its limitations and will not replace a powerful PC.
But if it is to be a fast machine with VM and necessarily x86 then probably this solution will not suit you
Half joke, half seriously, maybe something like that
Thanks for your input. Initially, I was going to build one powerful PC to do the stuff that you mentioned about VM’s, etc. in addition to being a server for the rest of the family. I honestly did not know that backing up my disk collection was illegal and also that the speed was dependent of the BD burner. Now I am leaning toward building 2 boxes. One low power one to serve my music and my movies. The second PC is for when my current 7 year old PC craps out on me. By that time, I might be building an AMD system with a year old 670 chipset.
p.s. I wonder who uses that high end disk changer that you have linked?
It is now a relic of the past, although I have heard that among BR collectors who can afford to buy, quite popular. Such an old school of media storage especially popular when someone has a home “out of grid” and limited resources of electricity, A PC that would work 24/7 only for you to see one movie once a week rather it would not be an inefficient solution. They were probably also bought by people who have “Home Theater” … you know, people who have $$$
