Home NAS Recommendations

[wildcat1115]

Budget (including currency): Under $100 though the smaller the better for wife approved factor and not knowing if I am going to get a ton of use out of it. Note: I do also have $45 in amazon gift cards to use.

Country: US

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: TrueNAS Scale, Immich for ~500GB of photos I have taken over the years, Jellyfin to stream the bin full of DVDs collecting dust, and Navidrome to get use out of my collections of CDs that is cluttering up the one car I own with a CD player.

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): 

 

Hello All, first time poster here.

 

Linus' recent investment in HexOS has sent me down the Home NAS rabbit hole and I am afraid I am in too deep and don't know which way is up anymore. I would like your help in making sure I make the best decision. Please feel free to ask any follow up questions needed, I have included the parts I already own, as well as, a summary of my own research so far.

 

Existing Parts

• An Asus GL751JL (16 GB RAM and a 256 GB 2.5 inch SSD) that I am foolishly sentimental towards, even though the battery is shot on it so it is basically an old, very heavy, desktop at this point.
• Two 1 TB 2.5 inch HDDs (Though one is currently in use in my gaming rig, though this could be replaced with an SSD pretty easy)

My research so far has lead me to 3 options.

 

1. Giving my beloved Asus a new life as a NAS
   1. I would buy a SATA to USB adapter to use with the SSD as a boot drive. Then I would use the two 1 TB drives I have in the laptops two 2.5 inch drive bays but I am afraid I will fill those up really quickly. I did look into larger 2.5 inch drives but they seem really expensive and I didn't see any on the used market near me.
   2. Recently I did look at using 3.5 inch drives instead of 2.5 inch drives using a SATA extension cord but I found out that 3.5 inch drives require 12V when my 2.5 inch drive bays would only provide 5V.
2. I have looked at this option from a local university surplus store https://msusurplusstore.com/products/dell-precision-t3600-16gb-6-core-xeon-no-hdd
   1. I would pair this with two 3TB drives that they are selling as well for pretty cheap and use the 256 GB from the laptop as a boot drive or buy another 256 GB from amazon. https://msusurplusstore.com/products/3tb-7200rpm-3-5-hdd
   2. This looks like a solid option but I worry it may be overkill for my simple use case and may not be very power efficient for a NAS that will be idling most of the time. I also worry about the proprietary nature of a prebuilt system but I like the idea of giving an old system new life.
3. I have looked at building a new system from used parts available in my local area and on various online stores but from what I have seen this will run me about $300.
   1. This would avoid the proprietary nature of prebuilds.

I look forward to you all helping set me straight on what I might do! Let me know if you have any questions! I would also appreciate any tips as I start my first NAS/homelab journey.

 

wildcat1115