Absolutely anything can be turned into a NAS, as long as you’re aware of your own needs and the hardware’s capabilities. A NAS is just a computer with some specific requirements.
When I first built my NAS, it only used parts that I got for free. A cheap micro ATX board with only two RAM slots, an i3-4160 CPU, 2x2G RAM, a worn-out SSD, and a 1T HDD. It couldn’t run something like TrueNAS, but it was enough for Proxmox and some Alpine containers running services like Samba, Transmission, Wireguard, and a small Debian VM for me to fuck around with. The single storage disk means there is no redundancy, so I only store replaceable data on it, like TV shows and installers.
There are many hardware-focused channels on video platforms that offer guides for budget home servers. Wolfgang’s Channel is good, and Hardware Haven and Raid Owl just finished a competition of building a sub-$200 home lab.
Just because it’s a bit different to what you asked, and no one else has said it, I’ve found great results with the Terramaster D5-300 and D4-300. Make sure you get the USB 3.1 type Cs, but I’ve been fine with the plain rather than ones loaded with RAID.
For every USB 3.1 socket on the back I get 5 drives, I can increase capacity incrementally, and for spinning rust they are faster than they could transfer anyway.
I’ve replaced my machine with a Dell USFF box now and it all works great.
Completely understand if it’s not your thing but you can add a drive box to your existing system without replacing anything. I’m currently up to 16 drives.
I host it in a Truenas BSD Jail, and the process was as straightforward as compiling and running any other Rust / Postgres project. Which error did you get?
Sure. My NAS I use for backups is also made from ancient desktop PC running ownCloud. The system is slow-ish by today’s standards, but since I had it already, I could invest in bigger SSD for data storage.
I got a small network running with Linux, android and Windows, but seldom use it. Windows install worked fine, but it remember it was not well documented (needed to use some argument for it to setup the service). Don’t use nextcloud but I do have vaultwarden working over it.
I’m planning to move to headscale due to the certificate management overhead.
Some ppl pointed out you can. NAS it’s just a tiny computer with a dedicated enclosure running 24/7 with a lot of services running to do multiple things because…is running 24/7! Is you just want to upload some files for a backup is better an external HDD through USB. Connect, upload, disconnect.
If you want your computer do more things you have to check how the computer handle these services by software or hardware(hardware better) A list of questions:
It support aspm (yes/not)
It support virtualization.
BIOS come with a dedicated raid chip
How many video codecs the processor/iGPU can decode
Ethernet port is, at least, gigabit
RAM is >4GB
You’re willing to spend time configuring and taking care of the thing
If a few of questions, or all, are NO I think it’s better to invest in an external USB HDD case.
My NAS is just a very old Acer desktop from like 2011. I bought a Fractal Meshify 2 case which can hold I think 14 hard drives and moved the internals into that. Works great.
Eventually I had to get a pcie card for more data ports, and replace the power supply with one that’s more than 300w.
I’ve heard good things about H2O AI if you want to self host and tweak the model by uploading documents of your own (so that you get answers based on your dataset). I’m not sure how difficult it is. Maybe someone more knowledgeable will chime in.
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