Redoing my NAS build

[Piggy]

Hey all, I had a NAS with 4 6TB WD Red drives I left at my stepdads house when I went to college, but he took the drives out and sold the rest of the system because he didn't have space for it in his new apartment. He said he'll pay for me to get a new system and reuse the "old" drives. I'm looking for a relatively small form factor case but can still handle at least 4 3.5" drives. I'd also like recommendations for what kind of processor I should run, it doesn't need to be nice by any stretch of the imagination, just capable of running Unraid and some apps on Unraid. 

 

Tldr: need hardware and case suggestions for NAS build

[Velcade]

Damn dad sold your old system? What's your budget?  Why not get a QNAP or Synology system 

[Jurrunio]

There's the Fractal 304, an mITX case with 6 3.5" bays inside. You will need a CPU with integrated graphics though because you're guaranteed to need a PCIe to SATA adapter card. mITX boards rarely have that many SATA ports from the start.

 

You might want ECC memory, in that case Ryzen or Xeon CPUs with C chipset are the only ones that can do it. Ryzen still depends on the board though, I think Asrock boards have ECC support enabled, but still need further checking. Most other brands disabled it for whatever reason.

[Piggy]

34 minutes ago, Velcade said:

Damn dad sold your old system? What's your budget?  Why not get a QNAP or Synology system 

He sold it with my permission, and I could care less because the drives were retained. Budget probably around ~$400, and I prefer to build my own so it's more upgradable in the future. 

 

23 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

There's the Fractal 304, an mITX case with 6 3.5" bays inside. You will need a CPU with integrated graphics though because you're guaranteed to need a PCIe to SATA adapter card. mITX boards rarely have that many SATA ports from the start.

 

You might want ECC memory, in that case Ryzen or Xeon CPUs with C chipset are the only ones that can do it. Ryzen still depends on the board though, I think Asrock boards have ECC support enabled, but still need further checking. Most other brands disabled it for whatever reason.

I'll look into that case, would one of the older Xeon processors that can be had for relatively cheap be adequate? I'm not entirely sure on which to get. And as for ECC I'll probably forgo that as it's not going to be in constant use

[Jurrunio]

2 hours ago, Piggy said:

would one of the older Xeon processors that can be had for relatively cheap be adequate?

You don't need Xeon if you don't use ECC. If you're going for them because they're cheap, source a board that can utilize a Xeon of that architecture first. There are a lot more Xeon supplies than there are boards.