Pineapple Wizard

That is very interesting to know @Samfisher! Thank you, I did not realize that and is very good to take into account. Tinkering is not the same as wiping for me so this is indeed very useful! That's also very useful to use @GDRRiley I don't want to say I have an unlimited amount of money on my account, but I am not against paying more in order to be able to just leave it alone afterwards and use it what I made it for.

I appreciate all the answers. I am still very much searching in how to approach this project so all answers are useful! I will take out the GPU and get more storage from the money I get. @GDRRiley 8TB in total, or 3+ HDDs of 8TB? @Samfisher I may still use FreeNAS, not because I am stubborn and really want to, but since I have an extra machine I may as well tinker with it and learn to configure. It's not set in stone, and before I start I will really put pros and cons on paper. But since this is an extra machine I do feel a little more liberty to tinker with it. All in all, thanks a lot for the input so far! It's really useful!

A little while ago I decided I want to build a completely new PC, new case/parts/everything. My topic isn't about that PC, it's about my current one. I do not really have family members or friends that are interested in my current one. So, I decided on re-designating this PC to a NAS. However, in two Discords I am I basically get the response that my current PC would be overkill as NAS, or that I am better off with just buying a pre-built one. Current PC Motherboard: ASRock B85M Pro4 CPU: Intel i5-4460 quad core 3.20Ghz. GPU: Radeon R9 390 Series. RAM: 16GB. 1 SSD and 2 HDD. The plan So the plan is that I repurpose this PC, take out what I don't need and buy stuff like a better case, perhaps a smaller motherboard so I can put the NAS away, slap FreeNAS or Plex on it and call it a day. It's also mostly used for family media. Videos, photos, shared music, you name it. So basically just storage. I know there are plenty of cloud based storage providers... but I want to re-purpose this PC and I like to have that stuff locally. I'm sure Google Drive will be around until I am dead, but pictures locally is better. Question So, in short, for a man that does not want to throw away what he has and needs a project, can I use my old PC as a NAS?