Hardware

Yep, that was my intention. First, it's low power, so it can be always-on with only a small impact on the power bill. Second, it's only gonna serve a few things - my photography hobby and media library, and maybe a service or two will come with time. If I need other services, I put them on a Hetzner box and they're much better taken care of.

I've done my share of sysadmin work and even a bit of server-room maintenance, I don't want a full-time, or even a part time job. This is mostly gonna sit in the corner, and be quiet. If the prices matched, I would have probably just gone with QNap or Synology, but this way I get the NAS and the disks for the same price.

Yes, I like it a lot. FD has this niche and does a good job.

I plan to try the OpenMediaVault first. For my use - a lot less for services and dynamic changes and a lot more for sitting in the closet quietly - it's good enough. And I can still dig into the internals if I wanted to.

And with OMV I can also teach my non-techy wife and kids how to add themselves more disk space :)

I like the case a lot. It surprised me as it was bigger than expected and than it looked like, but I should have seen it coming. For one, it has room for a full-blown PSU (and I have the PicoPSU), and for two, I picked it because it has room for 6 3.5" HDDs.

But it's still pretty small, it's nice enough that my wife would let me keep it in a living room :)

I thought about it, but I got rid of a lot of my electronic junk in the recent years and would have to buy everything from scratch anyway. So I went with the "small and silent and low-power" route. I also think it's going to live in a closet in my home office as well :)

Oh, I am enjoying it, but I didn't expect to start learning already. I thought I'll pick up a thing or two about the software side of things though, but most of the stuff I've been doing already for a long time. But yes, it's a deep rabbit hole.

My old HP laptop was referred to as having celery for a CPU. It was about capable of using Chrome without having a breakdown.

Well, look at these few things:

1. Modern CPUs, even Celerons, are powerful. People are driving a lot of workload even on ARM CPUs, and this is a proper 4-core x64 CPU. I mean, look at your phone, it's most likely doing a lot of full-hd media, right? And it's doing just fine.

2. Most commercially-available Home/Small Office NAS systems, by Synology, Asustor, QNAP and others, they have either CPUs in this class, or weaker, ARM CPUs. I'm not gonna be sitting at this box. I have 3 desktops and 3 laptops around the house for work - this is gonna be mostly storage.

3. My planned media management workload is a bit different than media processing. I mostly want to serve files around, maybe transcode something in the background. I don't plan to watch movies off of this (yet). I have a 4-core Hetzner VPS that is similar in power to this, and it's driving something like 4-5 docker containers and still serving all the files.

I think it's gonna be fine, but we shall see.

Yes, the specs say less then 5W per HDD. Even if I had older and hungrier disks at 10W each, it's still good. The CPU is consuming about 10 watts, the rest of the board, let's say another 10. Even if I fill all six HDD slots that the case has room for, I think it would work.