Upgrade PC & Turn old parts into NAS or leave old PC alone?

[rdmchr]

1. Budget & Location

Germany, <1.5k EUR would be preferred and 2k is my upper limit

2. Aim

After hosting some stuff in the cloud for a few years I'm now in a position where I can move that into my home. I'm using a mini PC as a server which has ample resources, except storage. My storage needs have gotten quite large (<8TB) over the years and since I'm a bit of a data hoarder I can't get myself to delete old stuff. Thus a NAS is probably the only solution, which brings me to my problem: Do I upgrade my PC and use the old parts for my NAS or buy new components for the NAS and leave my PC as is? Here are my current PC specs, I have highlighted the parts which I would use for the NAS:

• AMD 5 5600X
• Palit GamingPro GeForce RTX 3080 12GB LHR 12 GB Video Card
• MSI MAG B550 TOMAHAWK ATX AM4 Motherboard
• G.Skill Ripjaws V 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory
• Corsair SF750 750 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular SFX Power Supply
• Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
• Samsung 980 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
• Samsung 870 Evo 2 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive
• Samsung 860 Evo 500 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
• Lian Li PC-O11 Dynamic (more of a temporary solution, since I do plan on getting some kind of rack mountable solution in the future)
• I currently have 6 fans + a Lian Li Galahad AIO in my system + I still have the cooler that came with the CPU, I could probably split these up between the two systems and only buy 2 (?) new fans. The case comes with 2 fans and if I notice performance problems a fan or two won't break the bank

I also have a GTX 1060 3GB which I might be able to use for hardware encoding/decoding. So if I were to turn this into a NAS I would just need to buy some storage. The Motherboard has a lot of SATA connectors, 2 NVME slots and 2.5GBE and if necessary I could easily slot in a 10GBE card. My mini PC also has a 10GBE SFP+ port.

The only downside I could see is the power draw. Energy in Germany is quite expensive at the moment, so any money I spend now to decrease the power draw will be well worth it. On the other hand, the power draw of the CPU does not seem too bad and the PSU is platinum-certified.

 

My main PC is mostly used for programming. I mostly work on web apps and their backends, but I'm trying to get into ML development. On the side I do some gaming, my most recent games include Balatro, heavily modded Minecraft, The Finals and Lethal Company. My most played games are Minecraft and Rainbow Six and I want to try Manor Lords.

Except in modded Minecraft, I haven't noticed any real performance problems. Docker might run a little sluggish, but I think that's to be expected on Windows.

 

If I were to go the upgrade PC route this would be the new specs:

• Reuse Palit GamingPro GeForce RTX 3080 12GB LHR 12 GB Video Card
• Reuse all of the storage
• AMD Ryzen 5 7600X (~200EUR) (I mostly looked at AMD CPUs since I'm happy with my current one, but there is no real brand loyalty)
• MSI MAG B650 TOMAHAWK (~200EUR) (The same applies for the motherboard)
• Corsair Vengeance 32 GB (Correct me if I'm wrong but the important part seems to be that the speed is "right", so in this case I would need 5200 MT/s) (~100EUR)
• be quiet! Straight Power 12 750W ATX 3.0 (~140EUR)
• Fractal Design North (is the XL worth the extra money?) (~140EUR/~170EUR (XL))

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780EUR/810EUR, leaving over 500EUR for NAS drives. 3 Recertified Seagate Exos x16 HDDs with 16TB each would cost about 530EUR and would allow me to run a RAID 5 array. I might be able to find something cheaper on Ebay if I take some time.

 

Feel free to change the specs, but there are a few things I need: Wake on Lan, enough place/ports for storage, at least 2.5GBE, one USB-C (most of my peripherals are connected via a USB-C Hub) in the back and one easily accesible at the front.

 

If I were to go the "just build a NAS" route, I would probably follow this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjDoQA4C22c which has the following specs:

• Topton N5105 NAS Board (~155EUR)
• 2x Crucial 16GB DDR4 SODIMM (~66EUR)
• Fractal Design Node 304 (~100EUR)
• Corsair RM559x 2021 (~130EUR)

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~450EUR, about 330EUR cheaper, compared to the upgrade plan. But, the CPU is about ~80% slower according to CPU benchmark.

3. Monitors

I currently use two monitors. One 21.5" AOC E2275PWJ as my horizontal second monitor and one SAMSUNG LS34J550WQUXZG 34.1" as my main monitor. Both run at low refresh rates and resolution which probably explains why I have high FPS in most games. I noticed that a lot of realy nice monitors are currently being released, so I'll probably wait a little longer before upgrading to see what I can get and let the prices come down a little. I especially liked the MSI MPG 321URX, but it seems to be quite a bit more expensive in Europe.

4. Peripherals

No new peripherals are needed and any Windows license I might need to purchase won't count towards my budget as I can probably transfer my current Windows 10 Pro license.

 

 

 

 

So the final question is do I upgrade my current PC and use the "old" parts in a NAS or do I keep the PC as is and just build a NAS? Is there anything else I should consider? What is your opinion? Thank you in advance for any tips/advice

[Mumintroll]

One thing I noticed is the Samsung 870 Evo.

I hope you do know about its problems with bad blocks and crc errors that happens to many after some years? There are youtube videos about it if you search.

Those manufactured before november 2022 have these problems. Those manufactured after we don't know yet, since it takes some usage, some data written perhaps in 2 years or so for the errors to show up.

 

Samsung 980 I think had problems with bad firmware in the beginning but should be fixed, you have latest firmware right?

[rdmchr]

2 hours ago, Mumintroll said:

One thing I noticed is the Samsung 870 Evo.

I hope you do know about its problems with bad blocks and crc errors that happens to many after some years? There are youtube videos about it if you search.

Those manufactured before november 2022 have these problems. Those manufactured after we don't know yet, since it takes some usage, some data written perhaps in 2 years or so for the errors to show up.

 

Samsung 980 I think had problems with bad firmware in the beginning but should be fixed, you have latest firmware right?

Ah, I knew about the Firmware issue and I already installed the update.

 

The problems concerning the 870 were unknown to me though, so thanks for the heads up. My drive seems to have been manufactured in March 2023. Fingers crossed they fixed the issue.

[Mumintroll]

9 hours ago, rdmchr said:

Ah, I knew about the Firmware issue and I already installed the update.

 

The problems concerning the 870 were unknown to me though, so thanks for the heads up. My drive seems to have been manufactured in March 2023. Fingers crossed they fixed the issue.

 

If the 870 does fail with bad sectors and crc errors please let us know. There are plenty of people that are searching different forums and comments for a 870 evo manufactured in 2023 or newer which has yet suffered the same kind of failure.