Hello, since I’m moving to college soon I’m planning to actually get a backup plan. The first step would be which getting a NAS, or a couple for the second step of 1-2-3.
The requirements are these:
be quite
be cheap-ish
be able to run a SW raid
be able to run a couple of media streams
have a good NIC
Things that would be nice
ECC
VM support
But that’s where I’m running into a bit of trouble, I had a J3455 board which I ordered for a nas which ran unstable and just got worse over time. Now, I’m thinking of upgrading my gaming rig and putting the 4th gen I5 and DDR3 ram into the NAS, the problem is that its not the most efficient thing and I would have to find a now old mini itx board. On the other hand, I could go with new ryzen hardware, but that would be more expensive with not much benefit except being able to run ECC. I would love to go old enterprise but it would be hard to secure and my potential dorm-mate will HATE me.
What do you guys think I should do?, I’m kind-of stuck at an impasse
How much capacity do you need (now and in the 3/4 years at college)
do you want a NAS just for media or are you looking at a server for other things?
is space a constraint?
Overall your use case doesn’t look like it needs ECC (you aren’t running production loads on the server) and you aren’t doing real time video editing off an all flash array so no 10GbE and nvme storage server needs.
Given you are taking this to college and it will be hooked up in a shared room, I’d suggest getting an appliance NAS devices like a QNAP or Synology. They are basically quiet and have most of the features you are looking for. They can run containers and even a personal cloud option to backup your laptop etc. A 5 bay is plenty but even a 2bay mirror is fine and you can store one of those on a shelf.
If you are diying it then anything haswell or newer will be fairly power efficient and a little mini ITX build can be put together for less than an appliance. You will need to choose parts carefully though otherwise you end up with more wasted hardware.
Final suggestion and cheapest, go on eBay and buy a $50 Dell optiplex desktop. They are designed for office use. Open it up and you can get a couple of HDDs in there (go for 5400rpm drives to keep temps down). Mirror them in software and you have an ultrabudget NAS to get you started.
Seconding getting an old optiplex, if you need to spend as little as possible, and don’t mind a bit more power draw. Most of these are quiet enough, especially for a NAS and as @Airstripone stated, just replace the old drives with the ones you want (remember to check the model that it can support 2 drives of the kind you want.
Another option is going with something like a simple 2 bay NAS appliance which are going to be quieter, lower power, and smaller, but with that additional price tag to match (think $100-120 more than an optiplex)
