I would like to make myself a media server and NAS which stores my photoes and files. I have an Optiplex 3070 with a 1 TB Hdd which i plan to use for my media server and want to buy a raspberry pi to use as a NAS for photos and files. What do you think ? will raspberry pi5 be enough, i want something small.
I would install truenas scale on the optiplex and run plex or jellyfin as a app from truenas.
Adding a second large drive for redundancy would be good, also a smallish ssd for the truenas os to run from.
My personal setup takes this level deeper. I have a desktop computer running proxmox. proxmox is installed on a nvme drive. I have a VM running truenas that I have passed my sata controller to. So my 2 10TB sata drives and my 500Gb sata ssd show up as native drives in truenas. The 10tb mirror holds my media library and long term backups. The 500gb ssd is for running apps on trunas like plex, syncthing.
I have a 512 gb ssd in the optiplex and 1 tb hdd on sata. Should I upgrade the hdd to a 4 tb and use the optiplex for media server and nas? Using truenas?
If you have room in the Optiplex for another drive I would definitely get a second spinning drive for storing your media. Truenas will complain about you only having 1 drive for your media. The nice thing about having a pair of drives in a mirror is that is makes it very easy to upgrade in the future. I was running a pair of 6tb drives, until my brother gave me the 10tb ones. I just shut the system down and swapped one of the 6tb for a 10tb and booted it back up. It detected that the mirror was broken and I just told it to use the 10tb drive to fix it. A few hours later after it was done, I did it again with the other drive and then told it to expand the storage to 10tb.
If you want to get a 4tb, you could mirror that to the 1tb, (and you would be limited to 1tb) but you would have redundancy and it would be easy to swap the 1tb for a 4 in the future.
If I were you I would do what I did with proxmox. Install it on the ssd. Create a virtual machine for the Nas with a smaller vitrual disk from the 512gb ssd, 60Gb should be fine, and pass it your graphics card for the media server and the sata drives for your Nas storage and media storage. Then you have your Nas that you can use as a media server and you can also easily spin up new virtual machines to play with or test with.
I have another vm that I use just for docker containers.
I would get multiple drives and do RAID. Here’s a helpful calculator to figure out drive quantity, size, and configuration. The reason to do RAID is redundancy. Hard drives will fail (even NAS branded drives). You do not want your photos, media, etc to be lost in that case. I personally do not go with anything below RAID5 (and for super sensitive things, I’ll even go RAID6 - despite the hit on overall capacity. If the optiplex has drive capacity for multiple drives, I strongly recommend you go this route.