I’m really happy you’re looking at all your options. Running a homelab/nas can be a lot of fun, but, you’re right, it’s expensive, but you can turn what you learn from it into potential career advancements, so it could pay for itself.
Okay, I feel like I have a better idea of what you’re looking for now.
Unless you’re using some sort of shingled drive, reads from the magnetic platter should be non-destructive, so reading files for seeding shouldn’t do much to the drives in terms of wear and tear.
External drives are fine for durability, and if you get them from a reputable company I’m sure you’ll be happy with them. Buying cheap, high capacity external drives and shucking them is a common tactic that some data hoarders will use to get the most bang for their buck. Remember that external HDDs are going to be subject to more stresses than a normal drive (people moving them while they’re on, etc), so it wouldn’t be in the best interest of the manufacturer to make them less durable than regular HDDs. You just have to keep in mind that HDDs are mechanical in nature. Anything with moving parts will wear down over time and eventually break. Typically you should expect to cycle through your drives every 4 years or so (I say this while never having cycled any of my drives and they are all working fine).
I see you also keep picking drives that have NAS in the name, just so you know, that’s mostly marketing bullshit. They name the drives with different use cases so they can charge more for them and get that little bit of extra profit. There’s very little that can be done to tune the drives firmware for those different use cases. So, just get the most capacity your can afford from the company you want to use, and don’t worry about it it has NAS in the name.
You’re going to want more storage capacity, so don’t lock yourself down with a tiny case like the Node 304. Get a case that can hold a lot of HDDs. I went with the Node 804, which has mounting spots for 8 HDDs and two 2.5" SSDs (more spots than that when you realize that SSDs have no moving parts, so it doesn’t matter where you put them). I ended buying a new bigger case within a year of building my NAS, so definitely leave yourself room to grow, it may cost more up front, but will save you money in the long term.
As far as the GPU goes, I initially got a Ryzen 3400G, which is an APU, so I just used the integrated graphics. Since then, (remember how I bought a new case within a year?) I have upgraded the CPU to a Ryzen 3800x without onboard graphics, and I am now using this motherboard, which has onboard graphics, as well as IPMI. The IPMI is amazing, and I highly recommend it; it’s allowed me to have the computer in a remote location far away from any monitors, and it only has Ethernet cables and a power cable connected.
As far as other options goes, you could also get a bigger case for the computer you already have, that would allow you to add more storage. You could also get a very large SATA SSD (I just saw an 8tb one for ~$340), and you could just shove that into your current case anywhere to hold you over until you save up to get a more dedicated build going.
This may be a silly question, but why get a whole extra machine just to make 4tb available on the network? I have an old Linksys router with a USB port that allows you add USB storage to your network, that may be a good place to look if your needs are basic.
Additionally, it looks like you are going for a relatively powerful machine to be able to access a minimal amount of data at a slow speed. Have you considered just getting a couple of external hard drives and just hooking them up to a Raspberry Pi?
Going the Raspberry Pi route would cost $288-$333 depending on accessories. This could be a really good route depending on what all you want to do.
Another way to save more would be to just add the drives to an existing desktop, and just setup samba/nfs to run on it. You’d just need to leave the desktop on all the time, or turn it on when you need to access it elsewhere.
Also, for reference, I have a NAS with 40tb of storage that I use as a VPS host. I have several virtual machines running 24/7, including a Plex server. I stream many videos locally, and have many users that access my content regularly. From what I’ve learned over the years of running that machine, I know that as long as you are just directly streaming the files, and not trying to transcode them, you don’t need hardly any processing power. I don’t have a GPU in my server, and don’t see a need to put one in. If your needs are really as simple as your post suggests, the raspberry pi route would be the way to go. It would also allow you to dip your toes into running a NAS, and see where your original build was lacking, and give you a better idea for what you want your next evolution to look like.
I think you could do better with your storage drives. Go to pcpartpicker and look at storage then sort by price/GB ascending. The very first entry is a 6tb drive for $57
Just keep in mind, Brave is run by a for profit company, and privacy is only profitable if your customers are paying for that privacy. The fact that Brave is free for users means that their stated goals are antithetical to their business interests. You cannot trust Brave to respect your privacy.
Not sure why, but your comment made me think about the first machine I switched to Linux. It was a laptop who’s fan eventually had a bad bearing and needed to be replaced. Luckily it was still under warranty, so I sent the laptop in to get the fan replaced, and received my laptop back with Windows installed on it… I was so livid.