Mophead

Have you thought about potentially picking up an ex-Corp system like one of the small form factor Dell Optiplex boxes? You can usually get these on eBay for mega cheap, probably way cheaper than a synology box like you mentioned. This is the second NAS you mentioned on Amazon (UK) Dell box on eBay UK My a argument is: You can do way more with a desktop than a Synology box. You will have a bit more of a learning curve compared to a pre-build NAS solution, but you get way more bang for your buck, and you'll have so much more room to grow.

Debian/Ubuntu is a good shout. Slap in SnapRAID if you want to do unRAID things in the future (disclaimer, I've not used SnapRAID, but it's supposed to be awesome).

Thought about hosting SFTP (instead of FTP) outside of IIS? It's been years since I've properly dug into IIS, when I did I wasn't a big fan of it either ha! Sounds like you should be playing with IP restrictions in your web.config file.

Shame you can't pull $$$ together for unRAID. If I was limited to a singular system, I'd be rocking an unRAID build, but I do way more in my home lab. So I have bare metal Debian boxes, Hyper-V boxes, etc. unRAID is a fantastic no-frills solution for everything you want out of a file server OS. I really like how flexible it is, when I get close to running out of space, I just add another drive. It ofc has native Docker/VM support as I'm sure you're aware. I've heard great things about SnapRAID, though I've never personally used it, but that could be your answer. Bare metal Debian box with KVM, Docker and SnapRAID could be your ultimate all-in-one box / DIY unRAID solution.

So I just transitioned from a HP Box that had 2x Intel Xeon L5520 CPUs, these are 4C/8T CPUs. I moved over to a Ryzen 3200G, so one of the cheaper/lower end Ryzen APUs, it's more energy efficient and way more powerful. I would suggest that you look at building a system yourself, as you'll find a lot of the older servers online will consume a decent amount of power. That being said, it's not a bad place to start... ! (avoid boxes with 4x CPUs, power hungry mofos!)

I think it depends on if you have the time/motivation to want to learn something new, or if you just want a NAS now, plain and simple. Personally not a big fan of pre-built NAS units, but that's just my opinion, bare in mind I've never owned one, I just look at the cost and get put off. You could quite easily build your own, sounds like you already have an idea on system building, server stuff isn't light years beyond that. There's a lot of fantastic guides out on the internet, and a lot of videos demonstrating the power of having your own home server. I do recommend checking them out, see if they inspire you

If you have a decent network to get your thin client accessing your VM then sure it's possible. Gaming maybe not, but anything else goes. When I work from home, I put my work laptop in my server rack, hook it into the switch, then RDP in from my personal workstation. That way I don't have to plug my work laptop into all of my displays / mess with my existing setup. Everything works fine - meetings in Teams, multiple displays, even music if you want to do that. I wouldn't want to game over RDP though.. Is there a reason you need to do the whole thin client thing? Could you not do what LTT did with the home server + gaming rig in one? +1 for hardware pass-through

I think if you have enough RAM that CPU might be decent enough for you for unraid. It looks like the qnap NAS you mentioned has a dual core i3 - so that Xeon, which is essentially in i7-3770k without the iGPU if memory serves correctly, would be a great performance boost. You can get docker images for Minecraft servers, so that'll take a lot of resources out of the loop, ie spinning up a full VM for the server instance. You could always jump over to unraid with your current setup, and if you feel like your hardware isn't sufficient for say your Windows + Linux VMs, you could always embrace an additional server, you can pick up older HP/Dell/IBM servers for mega cheap on eBay. I personally use unraid as just a NAS, though I know it can do much more.

DIY would be the best route imo. 10Gig nic - yes SSDs - definitely not pointless! I'm a big fan of unraid, and using them as a cache drive is a dream - when you write data to your server, instead of having to dump data on disks directly, you can write to the SSD - resulting in perceived better performance. Unraid will then move the data to the drives over time from the SSD. File paths will remain the same. If you lookup things like 24 bay hot swap chassis in good ol' Google, you'll find some inspiration. /r/homelab is great also.

Pick up something like this: https://www.servercase.co.uk/shop/server-cases/rackmount/4u-chassis/4u-server-case-w-24x-35-hot-swappable-satasas-drive-bays-6gbs-minisas-sc-4324/ Get some decent hardware, ie Ryzen 5 / Ryzen 7, run unraid on it. There's some great videos on YT regarding unraid, worth checking them out. In a nutshell you can basically build a NAS where you just throw in hard drives as and when you need to, unraid also has support for docker containers natively, and full fat VMs if you want to run something that's not available as a docker image (pretty unlikely these days).

I say DIY NAS, with unraid, or SnapRaid if you feel that way inclined. Windows Storage spaces is supposed to be decent? No comment on this one personally. I use unraid personally, though I only use it for storage since my PLEX resides on a more robust system, unraid is great for being able to just chuck drives in as and when you need them, and of course you have the added benefit of natively running docker containers with a couple of clicks. I ran FreeNAS briefly, and whilst it was interesting, I didn't like the resource usage of ZFS considering I just want a simple NAS. I say built your own and get yourself a hot swap chassis, worth every penny, then throw in a HBA & SAS expander to connect all the drives. Something like this for a chassis: https://www.servercase.co.uk/shop/server-cases/rackmount/4u-chassis/4u-server-case-w-24x-35-hot-swappable-satasas-drive-bays-6gbs-minisas-sc-4324/

I've had a few HP servers, have you tried fault checking? Maintenance guide here. Get ESXi on it and use it for PLEX, FreeNAS, some Linux VMs, (I have a Windows VM on mine that's always running for remote desktop), or any other OS. I'd have it off you but getting it to the UK would be a bit pricey hahaha.

Personally I'd say go with ESXi, but I guess that's just because I haven't used unRAID much.. But from my experience with ESXi, I can say confidently that it's a fantastic hypervisor. You can get it for free too! I personally haven't messed with it, but you can also pass through your GPU to a VM (I believe the i7-920 supports vt-d, but the Intel website doesn't specifically say it doesn't support it...). But back to the main question... I'd install ESXi on a flash drive, 16GB is enough, then fill the system full of storage. Have some nice reliable and fast storage for your VM datastore (the storage for virtual operating systems) then pass through several physical disks to virtual disks so you don't have to use a VMFS partition (I'll get to this in a sec.) I'd then have a PLEX VM setup, run this under a Linux distro of your choosing (I went with Debian on my server), a webserver, a file server (you could use FreeNAS here and pass the disks directly to the VM), maybe a pfSense installation.. The choices are endless really!

OK.. The bootloader is fixed, now onto Ethernet and Audio!

I'll give it a go! Thanks!