Hardware and Storage options for first time Home NAS

[TheJagen]

Hi Everyone,

I am looking to build my first home NAS out of an old PC and I'm wondering if I am going in the right direction or if there are any recommendations/changes that I should make. 

My old gaming PC i want to use has a 3930k, 16GB Ram, 200gb SSD and a GTX680 or GTX1080 in it (depending on requirements which one i end up leaving in there). The SSD will be the OS boot.

I mainly want to use it for photo backup (Immich) and a plex (or other recommendation) media server. For the photo back up I want to be able to remotely back up mine and my wife's phone photos and view them. For the media server the main use case is over a 2.5g ethernet to 4k TV/Theatre PC and the occasional remote view on my phone or tablet/laptop.

My main questions are about what storage solution i should use and if my current hardware is enough for a NAS and media server.

I have found a good deal on refurbished SAS hard drives, 4x4tb dell enterprise so 12tb usable with 1 fail redundancy for about half the price of 4x ironwolf red 4tb. I do want to eventually add more drives but depending on pricing availability i may have to change to SATA for the new ones. I will be buying a pcie controller for the drives anyway so i don't mind getting a SAS or SATA and my MB has some on board SATA ports for future if required. if i decide to go SATA for future drives and have SAS currently can i add them to the partition pool or can i make a second pool out of the SATA drives or will it not let me have 2 kinds of drives at all. 

Is my current CPU powerful enough for HexOS and a Plex server, i heard there may be issues with encoding etc but will it work for just over network if i don't remotely watch. What recommendations do people have for a pcie SAS or SATA controller depending on what kind of configuration I decide on. 

 

Any help will be much appreciated and I cant wait to join the home NAS community 🙂 

[ubergeek]

So that is enough to run a nas. My only issue is with drive selection, if you don't need sas I would stay away from it. My first nas I built for hexos was slapped together with random cheap 4tb drives I pulled from ebay and for it's lifetime I only lost 3 drives. So save some scratch and just focus on a better quality sata drive.