Oh fickle father time.
I prepared the blogpost below some time ago, and of course everything changed between then & now. The basic requirements are still true, but it truned into something completely different!
I managed to get a really good deal on a Xeon E5-2630L v4, a processor that even now, used on Ebay was ~$600, I managed to get for 193 Euro's (whole story here). Then I found the 'perfect' case, a Node 804 from Fractal:
It seemed to have all the right properties, seperated air passages (MB and HD), space for 8(!) 120mm fans to keep fan speeds (and noise) low. It also had a great layout that could do water-cooling:
The 'perfect' NAS.
My personal quest for all things storage
Is such a thing even possible?
Let's break the first myth, of course it's not possible! A NAS means something else to so many different people. A DevOps engineer will have totally different needs than a musician or an artist.What do I want from a NAS?
- Really low power consumption, if possible, under 30W continuous.
- Running Plex for my media.
- Running Time-Machine for my Fiancee's Apple.
- Being able to run Docker, or even K8S at a pinch.
- Small form factor
- +-10Tbytes of storage in RAID 5 (HDDs)
- +-2Tbytes of storage in RAID 0 (SSDs)
- 10Gbit of Ethernet IO.
- Modern, power-saving CPU - Intel, AMD?
- PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, 2 of.
- Modern, platinum Power Supply
- Quiet case that can spin-up in times of higher heat output
- Micro-ATX form factor
- Minimum of 32Gbytes of memory
- Linux OS. (Debian/Ubuntu)?
