n00b question, sorry. If I had a desktop that could hold 4 HD and 2 SSD, could I turn it into a NAS? Could someone point me in the right direction if this makes sense?
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.
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.
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.
Anything that can can provide storage attached to the network is a potential NAS. It doesn’t take a lot of power to just offer and store files. If you start getting into stuff like live transcoding or heavy encrypt/decrypt that’s a bit different matter.
My first NAS was an old desktop that I got for $300 running an FX-6300 and a GTX 550, I slapped a couple hard drives in there, installed Ubuntu, and made an SMB share.
I’d recommend installing TrueNAS Scale on a system rather than doing what I did in part due to it being so much better than what I was doing, but you could run it on a potato if you wanted.
Hell my latest NAS upgrade is going from a PowerEdge T610 (tower server from like 2010ish) running TrueNAS Scale to a normal desktop (from 2017) running TrueNAS Scale
If anything using normal desktop hardware makes servicing it easier than using old server hardware
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