Start with a mirror of 2 drives. Cheap and easy later expansion. And if you change the server, easily re-imported elsewhere.
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Yeah, thatās also a valid option. Although I would not be able to expand the array as easy as with raidz1 or raidz2. Currently, Iām also thinking about getting 4x4TB drives for 100 bucks each and running raidz1. This would be far below the usable space I would get with 3x10TB (used) drives, but still acceptable from both a price and storage perspective.
With a 4-wide RAIDZ, you have to add another 4 drives as a new vdev to expand the pool. With a mirror, you only need two new drives. In both cases you get double performance due to striping. Iām talking adding new drives to a pool, not replacing old disks with new ones.
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Performance wise, all the drives in the same VDEV will be limited to the SATA2 bus that 2/3 of them are on with this platform.
Iām not saying this platform is not capable of being a home NAS, but the original question was āis this still a good option for a NAS server in 2022ā.
Its very oldā¦ with old IO standards, etc. known un-patched CPU vulnerabilities, some boards have SATA3 controller bugs, it only has 2 sata3 ports, etc. My bet is you could pick up a secondhand Skylake board + cpu + RAM for the cost of one or two drives if you look around.
Iām not saying you need to go new - just that newer platforms (still secondhand) arenāt expensive and a far better starting point for a new build.
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Still doesnāt matter much as spinning rust doesnāt go near 300Mbyte/s anyway (well, I guess if the data is buffered you might hit it for one or two seconds) tops. Iām still on a Dell T20 (G3220) which runs just fine and tops out Gbit linespeed.
OPs hardware isnāt ideal but it works fine for now as starting point.
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Again, thanks for all the help! I have purchased three new drives and Iām looking forward to this setup. Letās see how it will turn out to be in the end 
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