Is it worthwhile to repurpose an old pc as NAS?

[Fedeoeae]

Would you recommend to do this?

 

https://www.howtogeek.com/190835/how-to-turn-an-old-pc-into-a-home-file-server/

 

I have an old Lenovo office PC with a gen 4 core i5. What are the upsides and downsides?

 

Thanks for the replies.

[Naijin]

8 minutes ago, Fedeoeae said:

Would you recommend to do this?

 

https://www.howtogeek.com/190835/how-to-turn-an-old-pc-into-a-home-file-server/

 

I have an old Lenovo office PC with a gen 4 core i5. What are the upsides and downsides?

 

Thanks for the replies.

I am currently using FreeNAS, but that guide is a very old version.

I started out with a mirrored NAS with 2x 1TB drives running on an i7 2600 with 8GB RAM. It quickly became too small since I put a lot of GoPro video data on there. I upgraded to 4x 3TB drives in Raid-Z1 configuration for about 7.5TB of actual storage. It works amazing. I did have it fail before so upgraded cpu, motherboard and RAM to an Athlon 3000G and 12 GB RAM. Stability is great and you can schedule tasks as well.

 

I would just suggest following the official documentation. It's what I used to install, create a RAID volume and create shares.

https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/11.3-U5/intro.html

[tikker]

I use Unraid on my old gaming PC and turned it into a NAS / Plex server. It may use a bit more power than a dedicated solution, but it's a great way to reuse old hardware that would otherwise just collect dust on a shelf. Plus it's on sleep most of the time anyway for me so power draw isn't that big of a deal.

[Salacious B Crum]

Go for it thats plenty of juice for a decent NAS if you go with something like unRAID you can learn vm's and docker and as stated it would make a half decent plex server I reused my I7 6700 into a 28TB server that also doubles as my plex server and it is my homeassistant server running a dozen docker containers its still got plenty of juice in the tank

[Fedeoeae]

Ok, I will probably buy unraid plus (for future upgradability), as it seems easier to use and it supports upgrading / adding drives (espescialy of different sizes). Any tips for that?

[Salacious B Crum]

7 hours ago, Fedeoeae said:

Ok, I will probably buy unraid plus (for future upgradability), as it seems easier to use and it supports upgrading / adding drives (espescialy of different sizes). Any tips for that?

You'll will like unRAID it has a very short learning curve and is very versatile and the guys over on the forum are extremely helpful I usually tell people that the cheapest part of your build will be the unRAID license as some seem on the fence about paying for it when there are free alternatives but it offers some unique advantages I will note though that if transfer speed is your thing unRAID is not for you due to the way it calculates parity but its more than fast enough otherwise