Lowest power 16TB freenas box & 2gig fiber

Seeing as how just need simple file storage, then you can pick up a diskless 4 bay nas from newegg for around $200-$300. Most will have arm processors and top out at about 35 watts with standby at about 15 watts. That's the easiest solution especially since to don't care about what software it comes with as long as works. 5 & 6 bays units are good bit more expensive and you might as well build you own.

QNAP TS-431

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t does play nice with 6 terabyte drives or should I specifically go for network attached storage drives with that?

I checked out the QNAP website. They have a compatibility list so the hard drive choice is up to you. Of course, Logan talks about HGST all time and the HGST 8TB drives are on the list. I personally haven't used a pre-built diskless system in years so I can't testify as to how well one like this will perform.

QNAP TS-431 Compatibility list

Well originally I brought up the 8 terabyte from Seagate because on Amazon I actually saw one for 200 and $4 before tax unfortunately that one sold out and that same listening is now 2:55 like normal but that does mean we can snap them up for like $220 which is incredible for the dollar

Knock on wood every drive that is still an old spinning drive is a Seagate model some of them are over 10 years old I have like 16 terabytes and I have never lost a Seagate unit

I picked up a ds411 from the LTT garage sale the other day for $100CDN: 4-bay, performs like a champ. Synology NAS devices have so many functions that I'd never use them all. The QNAP TS-451 has pretty powerful hardware, although my Synology NAS devices (I have 2) have never let me down in that department either, so maybe I'm just measurebating when I get all excited over the TS series.

The NAS4free I built, with half a dozen 4TB HGST drives obviously outperforms the smaller guys, but I've found that I only boot it once every couple of weeks to make backups, then kill it. Running it 24/7 would seem a waste of power when the ds4xx units use 11W at idle.

I think for my purposes a diskless pre-built that only consumes like 15 watt
would probably be what I am looking for so long as I can still transfer at one gigabit speeds of 100 megabytes per second over that Ethernet

My question is I suppose if I had a four-bay system
does my computer that is also on the same router
just see 4 hard drives?
or does it see 1 unit,
that I click into, that has 4 hard drives?

As if I just had a laptop with 4 external USB hard drives attached and plugged into the network

I have a question if I buy a diskless mass system like the one you linked can I freely add more hard drives one by one or do I have to have them all all at once?

The prebuild NAS' will have software (usualy linux) on it that will manage the raid etc, you wont see the drives, youll see whatever shares you setup.

If its costing you more than $300 for the NAS bay, you may as well think about making your own for just a little more the price difference will be minimal and will give you far more flexibility.

You can add more disks later. You may or may not need to do some setup depending on what software they use.

Do you think we could build one that is that low power?

The motherboards that were posted earlier are 15W atom processors.

keep in mind that processors, etc will use less power when idle, 15w is the max for the CPU.

Mk cool, since I'm just on my cellphone at work, I havnt looked at the parts I'm off in like an hour and. A half

oh god, the reviews on newegg for that nas box scare the hell out of me

If you look closely at the other 4-bay boxes on newegg, you'll see that the QNAP actually has the highest rating out of any other box that's less the $500. I only saw 4 other 4-bay units that had 5 eggs and they ranged from $508 to $629 and most of them didn't have very many reviews. If you are going to spend that much then you might as well build your own with one of the atom embedded motherboards mentioned earlier with your chosen open source software.