Office liquidation desktops are great for home servers (if you aren’t paying for power). But they generally are very limited on storage. Limited bays to install hard drives and limited SATA ports. So you rapidly end up with drives just sitting on the bottom of the case and real jank pcie boards to extend your storage.
Which then becomes a HUGE issue when you have a drive failure. Because now you need to actually identify which drive is the failed one which involves reading off serial numbers and, depending on the setup/OS, making sure you get the order right when you plug them back in.
Whereas a 4-bay NAS generally has dedicated hardware and hot swap bays which make this trivial. You might never actually use the hot swap capability, but it makes checking which drive is the bad drive fairly trivial.
Also, a good 4 bay NAS is REAL easy to unplug and put in the trunk of your car during a disaster. Don’t ask me how I know.
I don’t have direct experience with them, but my understanding from youtubes is that the ugreen NASes are specifically designed for you to just ignore their OS and install your own (so truenas or proxmox).
Hardware tinkering is more limited but… there is very much a question of how much of that people actually do.
Oh yeah, that is true. Mini PC has a proper ssd nvme.
Thanks for the feedback! Will look at the NAS you recommend, but i thik i want more freedom to tinker. Will definitely look into proxmox!
Just get a used PC and make a NAS. No need to buy a premade on.
For a (first) NAS, I generally discourage this.
Office liquidation desktops are great for home servers (if you aren’t paying for power). But they generally are very limited on storage. Limited bays to install hard drives and limited SATA ports. So you rapidly end up with drives just sitting on the bottom of the case and real jank pcie boards to extend your storage.
Which then becomes a HUGE issue when you have a drive failure. Because now you need to actually identify which drive is the failed one which involves reading off serial numbers and, depending on the setup/OS, making sure you get the order right when you plug them back in.
Whereas a 4-bay NAS generally has dedicated hardware and hot swap bays which make this trivial. You might never actually use the hot swap capability, but it makes checking which drive is the bad drive fairly trivial.
Also, a good 4 bay NAS is REAL easy to unplug and put in the trunk of your car during a disaster. Don’t ask me how I know.
I don’t have direct experience with them, but my understanding from youtubes is that the ugreen NASes are specifically designed for you to just ignore their OS and install your own (so truenas or proxmox).
Hardware tinkering is more limited but… there is very much a question of how much of that people actually do.
The first thing I did with my ugreen was install truenas, then learn how to use truenas.
While I’ve migrated several docker compose apps over, I feel I’m still learning the truenas part of the system.