Desktop Died: NAS vs Full Replace

Mojo-Jojo · July 15, 2014

Today I had my desktop die on me after 5/6 years. Won't POST anymore. I've reset CMOS, tried without any peripherals, reseated components, all the usual..

I'm not gonna try and fix it. It's an old s775 system that's long overdue to be replaced. No Videocard even.

I've barely used it. When I started college, I knew I'd need a powerful laptop which I have now. All I used it for the past years was backups.

Now, my question to you:

The drives in there are 2x500GB and 1x250GB, all still good.

Should I just get a NAS, and pop the drives in there and maybe in the future upgrade them?

Or should I replace the desktop in full, save up and build a nice machine?

The first option for me would be better because it's cheaper, but then again I do use my laptop for gaming and school-related tasks now. It's not great at gaming and gets rather hot. Its battery has also almost died.

Having a desktop would be better for gaming to keep my lappy usage to a minimum, so that it'll be clean/last longer for just college things.

What do you think?

P.S.: My storage needs are not so demanding. I have a 500GB storage drive in my laptop and that is MORE than plenty for everything, so these drives wouldn't even need to be upgraded for the NAS. Just a possibility.

Sorry about posting in the wrong section I hope you still love me

Goodmane · July 15, 2014

I don't know for sure but If you put them in NAS they'll be on as long as you keep the power of that NAS on. And they might also die soon. What I would do is, if you really want to back up your data, Put it in laptop. Get an external drive and/or NAS case for your HDD's. Although it might be much more cheaper just to put them in a external HDD box rather then NAS. Be sure to have 3 copies of everything (1 of them being a brand new drive) if the data you'll lose is priceless for you. And yes family photos are priceless.

Silmano · July 16, 2014

It all depends on how much money do you want to spend... A NAS could be around 100€ and a gaming system could be around 600-1000€ (or more).

As for the HDDs, you can always use them as secondary storage if you build a desktop PC with a SSD as primary storage.

Mojo-Jojo · July 16, 2014

I don't know for sure but If you put them in NAS they'll be on as long as you keep the power of that NAS on. And they might also die soon. What I would do is, if you really want to back up your data, Put it in laptop. Get an external drive and/or NAS case for your HDD's. Although it might be much more cheaper just to put them in a external HDD box rather then NAS. Be sure to have 3 copies of everything (1 of them being a brand new drive) if the data you'll lose is priceless for you. And yes family photos are priceless.

Yeah, I mostly have music and videos on there. Other than that, I don't have much on there at all. Some college stuff that's always backed up to a USB drive, dropbox, and the school's SVN server.

An external drive would be great, but then I have three drives. I was thinking if I got a NAS I could use that for music streaming to my Phone, too, and watching movies downstairs. Maybe attach a printer that we have to plug into other systems everytime or mail files to be printed around.

It all depends on how much money do you want to spend... A NAS could be around 100€ and a gaming system could be around 600-1000€ (or more).

As for the HDDs, you can always use them as secondary storage if you build a desktop PC with a SSD as primary storage.

True. Since I'm a college student and can't get many hours right now at work, every bit of money saved counts. Which is why I'm hesitant of just going balls to the walls immediately. Otherwise I would.

Right now the PC seems to boot again after unplugging it for the night, so I guess it just needed some good dry time.

For now I'm going to make sure everything is backed up and mirrored and where I need it in case anything fails.

So far, I do think a NAS would be a better option, and even if that's expensive the External HDD case sounds like a great idea. I can't believe I didn't think of that as an option.