Thinking about buying a desktop for NAS/Server, is this specs worth for the price?

[Chriexpe]

I have been considering buying a desktop to create a server (mainly for NAS), and I just found (what appears to be) a good deal, HP Elitedesk 800 G1 sff I7 4770 8GB Ram 1TB HDD for around $250, is it worth it? Or are there better alternatives? There may only be a problem with the power supply, which is only 250W

[Electronics Wizardy]

How much storage do you want in your nas?

 

The biggest issue I see if the last of drive bays. You can probably only get like 2-4hdds in there.

 

Id probably rather get a full form factor one with 2x 5.25 bays then put the 3 in 2 adapters for about 4-5 hdds in there.

 

 

[DrMacintosh]

How much storage do you plan of having? Right now I have a Raspberry Pi 4 acting as an SMB file server. It’s hooked up to a 2TB HDD in a USB enclosure. I have the ports for 3 more drives. The Pi itself was only $35. A good enclosure that supports putting a drive to sleep is another $20-30 each. It’s fine for a basic NAS.

[RONOTHAN##]

Unless you already have the prebuilt lying around, you're probably better off just buying one of the premade solutions. It'll be more power efficient, will probably support more drives natively, be less of a headache, and the only area where the 4770 will do better is if you want to run a lot of services on that machine.

 

That said, if you're trying to do this for the learning experience, you'd then be better off buying a used server with some drives in the front. Scour your local area for people selling decommissioned servers at a good price (I got a dual 2011 rig with 8 hot swap bays and 64GB of RAM for ~$120). It will have more features useful for servers like IPMI, redundant everything, hot swap most things, etc.

[BondiBlue]

That's rather pricey for an old office PC. Besides, that machine can't hold more than a couple drives, so it's not super well suited to file server duty. I'd look for something larger that can support more drives, and also consider looking for something lower end. You definitely don't need a Core i7 in a file server. Or, you could always just go with an off the shelf NAS unit. It would cost more, but it would use less energy, take up less space, be easy to set up, and support multiple drives. 

[ThaCyko]

Im replacing an old WD 4tb network drive and this is what i went with

 

Used AMD A10-9700 Cpu for.......................... $50

Refurbished PRIME B450M-A/CSM Mobo ...........$50

Silicon Power 16GB (2 x 8GB)  DDR4 3000MHz .... $53

Montech Flyer Micro ATX Computer Gaming Case $36

Western Digital 500GB WD Blue SN550 NVMe ......$50

2x Seagate BarraCuda 8TB 5400 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s Hard Disks $150 each

 

Total cost just over $500

 

only thing missing is PSU which i have one laying around

 

The NVME drive will store OS and any other software i might want to run, i might put an emulator on it.  The two seagate drives will be the mass storage