My nas started with a pile of old 2-8tb drives I had amassed through the years from fixing computers and upgrading storage of various things. Back then 20tb was crazy. Now I have a nas where a single drive is 18tb and the full array is over 200tb.
I highly encourage anyone to build with whatever you can. Get off streaming, save your money. You can run this shit on a raspberry pi with a 4tb hard drive for under $100, probably way less with a refurb drive and a used pi. Or buy an old ewaste pc for $1-200 and stuff it with drives.
it doesn’t need to be a workhorse unless you want to create some monster Jellyfin server that can transcode 8+ uhd remux streams concurrently (and even then it doesn’t have to be that crazy, 10th gen intel igpu will handle a lot). But if you genuinely need that many streams you’ll probably need a gpu so make sure you get something with a pcie slot of appropriate bandwidth (x16 most likely)
Additionally if you truly want to stuff it full of drives def make sure it has pcie x16 so you can add hba card. Most mobos (especially office pcs and stuff like old dells and thinkcenters) come with like 2-4 sata ports max. Lsi 9300-8i or 16i will add 8 or 16 sata lanes for like $30-50 bucks (though beware of the many counterfeits) and you’ll either have to move to a new case ($) or fashion some kind of external drive bay (sff cables running out of host of to whatever drive bay)
those are rookie numbers
Gotta start somewhere
My nas started with a pile of old 2-8tb drives I had amassed through the years from fixing computers and upgrading storage of various things. Back then 20tb was crazy. Now I have a nas where a single drive is 18tb and the full array is over 200tb.
I highly encourage anyone to build with whatever you can. Get off streaming, save your money. You can run this shit on a raspberry pi with a 4tb hard drive for under $100, probably way less with a refurb drive and a used pi. Or buy an old ewaste pc for $1-200 and stuff it with drives.
it doesn’t need to be a workhorse unless you want to create some monster Jellyfin server that can transcode 8+ uhd remux streams concurrently (and even then it doesn’t have to be that crazy, 10th gen intel igpu will handle a lot). But if you genuinely need that many streams you’ll probably need a gpu so make sure you get something with a pcie slot of appropriate bandwidth (x16 most likely)
Additionally if you truly want to stuff it full of drives def make sure it has pcie x16 so you can add hba card. Most mobos (especially office pcs and stuff like old dells and thinkcenters) come with like 2-4 sata ports max. Lsi 9300-8i or 16i will add 8 or 16 sata lanes for like $30-50 bucks (though beware of the many counterfeits) and you’ll either have to move to a new case ($) or fashion some kind of external drive bay (sff cables running out of host of to whatever drive bay)