failblox

As others mentioned, it's very doable as long as you're careful about it. I would be gentle pulling the cooler off the PCB, as the GPU silicon doesn't have an integrated heat spreader, unlike a CPU (the metal part that you apply thermal paste to on a CPU). Because of this, it can be a lot easier to damage the GPU if you're not careful.

If you can boot into safe mode perfectly fine then it doesn't seem like a hardware issue to me. You could try running a graphically intensive stress test in safe mode to check if there's any weird artifacts/glitching/crashing.

Is it doing a hard restart (your computer just cuts to a black screen like you ripped the power out), or does it restart like when doing a windows update (your computer shows "Restarting")?

Unfortunately both amazon.ca and newegg.ca don't seem to have sufficient quantities of the Seagate 4TB Constellation drive that @TheCherryKing linked above. Amazon only has two and Newegg only seems to have one available :\ Guess I'll be sticking with the WD Reds then.

What exactly do you mean by sluggish? Could you be a bit more specific?

I don't think there'd be much of a difference between 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM drives if they're mashed together in a RAID-Z configuration. Also, from what I've read, I'd likely max out a single gigabit connection even with 5400 RPM drives.

I think I'll wait it out on the SSD caching for now and see what the performance is like without one. I'm alright with Seagate enterprise HDDs, so I'm definitely considering getting the Constellation drives. It's just that I've never heard of that specific model before so I'd like to do some research before throwing all my data on them.

The NAS isn't going to be used extremely heavily - I'll likely be the heaviest user of it. It'll mainly be used for backing up systems around the house and as a redundant, reliable storage system for important files. Perhaps having an SSD for cache wouldn't make much of a difference in my use case.

I've always just stuck by the 1GB of RAM per TB of storage, but I haven't seen that guide before. I'm just worried about any potential performance impacts, since the guide says that 8GB of RAM will just "get you through the 24TB range". It seems a little bit borderline for me, but if you don't think it'll have any significant performance impacts, then I'd totally go with 8GB.

Oh wow that's actually a pretty good price for an enterprise drive - I'll look into it, thanks.

The Kingston ValueRAM is ECC afaik. I've considered adding an SSD for caching, but I'm not sure if it would actually make a significant performance difference... How much more performance do you think I could get with an SSD? Hmm I don't know about buying non-NAS specific HDDs. I guess I'd rather play it safe than sorry since the WD Reds were designed from the ground up to be run 24/7. I've also always been a little bit sketched by Seagate HDDs - I haven't heard very many good things about their consumer HDDs. Thanks for the input!

What makes you worried about the power supply that was included with your PC? Could you peek in your case to check out which brand and model it is?

Could you suggest/link any enterprise drives that are cheaper? (also just mentioning again that the prices are in CAD)

You wouldn't see a noticeable performance difference in MS Office unless you're doing some serious number crunching.

I'd rather not buy something prebuilt if I can avoid it. I know they're generally a lot cheaper, but flexibility and customization are very important to me.