nas A small NAS on a budget

[HippoPCBuilder]

Budget (including currency): £200-ish (but can possibly stretch a bit...)

Country: UK

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Running unraid or TrueNAS

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

I'd like a NAS with at least 2TB of storage space (after RAID / parity but before filesystem). Preferably reasonably small form-factor, but not necessarily. No need for a GPU for transcoding etc., and only using gigabit ethernet at home so no need for 2 gigabit networking etc. 

I will be using this as an NVR as well as just general file storage.

 

Assuming HDDs will be used, but how much would it be to go all SSD and not have to run a RAID configuration?

Rather not use used components but at my budget seems unlikely I'll go all brand-new.

 

[Needfuldoer]

With your budget, I'd recommend a used office desktop like a Dell Optiplex with a couple hard drives configured as a mirror. For example, here's one with an i7 6700, 16 GB of RAM, a 240 gig boot SSD, and one 2 TB hard drive included for 120 pounds. Add a second 2 TB drive and you're golden.

 

While it's physically not the smallest solution, it's a lot of computer for your money. Power consumption is usually pretty good on these, and parts are proprietary but plentiful and easy to look up.

 

Just remember if you buy used hard drives, make sure they're SATA not SAS. SAS drives will need a controller card. I also recommend picking up a "sold spare" of the same size from another vendor, so you have a spare on the shelf ready to go in case one of your drives fails. 

 

This video should give you the general idea. Unfortunately I don't think Dell made a desktop form factor machine that can take two 3.5" hard drives after the x010 Ivy Bridge generation though.

 

[ki8aras]

another option is something like a prodesk 400 g5 (sff or not)

its a bit cheaper than what was already mentioned, also it is 8th gen so you can go up to a 9900k if you ever need more horsepower

[HippoPCBuilder]

So I assume there's nothing similar to the Synology DS220j/223j? I assume for small NAS systems on a budget, a prebuilt NAS would probably be better?