NAS Advice

Aarond84 · January 26, 2021

Hey,

I am looking to build a dedicated nas over the coming months. Bit of a project to give me something to plan and build. Currently I have 6tb storage in my gaming rig and use plex to stream movies and music around the house. Some of it will involve 4k streaming. Want to build a dedicated nas.

Its going to be built mainly using 2nd hand parts I will look to get either locally. Off classified adds and ebay etc.

Apart from Psu which I will buy new once I know all the hardware will buy something I know is decent standard and is power efficient and case which I may buy new. Any recommendations on cases which are not too expensive but have a descent support as far as drive bays go?

Mainly though looking for advice on a cpu that will be as cheap as possible and motherboard advice as whilst I've built a few gaming rigs recently without any issues I'm not really clued up on older hardware that would be suitable. Any recommendations and advice would be appreciated then I can go away researching them.

Cheers.

Archer42 · January 26, 2021

IMO if you are going to buy stuff anyway - go for new low-end hardware. Used/old stuff is fine if you have it already, but buying it is questionable. It will inevitably be less power-efficient, and old hardware tends to die sooner a later...

You can either get one of those itx boards with soldered CPU, but then number of sata ports might be an issue, or get some cheap AM4/LGA1200 board with athlon or celeron, here you'll have more flexibility but also potentially more heat generation/power usage.

If you want to do media transcoding though, you might need pretty powerful CPU. Need to do some research here in terms of performance required for the type of streaming you want.