TheBlackKey

OK, thanks for everybody's help. I think I"ll use an old system and add 3 drives in RAID 5 and run open media vault.

2 Have never set up Linux, but I'm willing to learn/try. Supakomputa recommended openmediavault, would this be easier to setup/use? 3 Budget is somewhat limited, so was thinking about RAID 5

except for the higher requirements, why would you recommend openmediavault more over freenas?

So I've been thinking for a while about setting up my own NAS and now that I'm moving I thought about doing it now. My original plan was to buy an older computer used (4 cores processor, at least 8 gb's of ram) and just put some new HDD's in and run FreeNAS. Now in my gaming PC I have a I7-7700, 16gb's of corsair vengeance ddr4 (3000mhz) and the asus prime z170-a mobo. I was thinking that maybe I could just use these for the NAS and upgrade my gaming pc to third gen ryzen 5 or 7 (depending on the budget/performance). I want to use my NAS to store all my music and that it works well with Volumio, run a plex server for my movies/shows and to save some work documents/code and some pictures. Now I still have some questions: Would it be worth it using my hardware from my gaming pc for my nas, because it would be more expensive upgrading to ryzen than buying an older used PC? Is FreeNAS a good solution for what I want from my NAS (mostly Volumio)? If not what would be a better solution. Can you use RAID to add some redundancy? What hard drives would you recommend? Good to know: I'm located in the EU, so prices vary from the US/CA Thanks in advance for any help.