Help with a decision (NAS)
Btw, though the title uses the word help, I tagged it with discussion because I assume that's probably a bit more accurate.
I wrote this as a response to someone who was trying to figure out how to power and get the SATA ports for a NAS if going the route of using a TinyMiniMicro system. I told him about the m.2 to 6-port sata device (or 2-port for e-key) and somehow I ended up with the post below. It's been something I've been meaning to post here, but when I finished, I realized it looked like I was trauma-dumping in his thread and it was only barely related to his subject (I connected it with "I'm making a similar decision..." Anyway, I cut most of that post out (and simply answered his question) but thought that since I had written it, I should cut/paste into my own post and see what y'all think. Without further ado:
I had a 2-drive Terramaster last year and filled up my drives so I bought two 18 TB drives and decided that I was going to build myself a NAS. I went crazy during the black Friday. I was originally going to use a jonsbo n4 with an n150 motherboard, decided that I might want to try some AI stuff and thought I should build a NAS that has more power and upgradability so I sent back the n150 motherboard and n4 and bought a Core Ultra 245k and a MSI B850M-WI-FI. I built it out then decided that's too much power for my NAS so I virtualized truenas on proxmox. Then I decided that I wanted my NAS to just be a NAS and that I wanted to build a router with OPNsense since my Asus mesh system didn't support vlans - so I bought two n150 motherboards. I built my router, it's doing fine, but I haven't touched my NAS yet (I've got other projects that I keep giving myself so my time sucks). My dad just gave me my niece's old computer because she didn't use it anymore (an optiplex 3040 with an i5-6500 and 32gb DDR3) so now I'm thinking about using that for my truenas box but it reminded me that early last year, I thought about repurposing an old elitedesk g2 mini with a 6500t and 32gb of ddr4 into a NAS.
So now I've got a choice:
*Optiplex 3040
*Elitedesk G2 Mini
*N150 motherboard that is not only still new in box but still has the shipping cover on it - though this only has one Sodimm slot so it will only have 16GB of ddr5
*Keep the big system
I'm still very much a novice, but that's due to time constraints more than ability. Plus the "other projects that I've given myself" include learning enough esp32 for my first project (making automatically moving Andorian Antenna for a costume for my wife for a music festival next month) and since I had "heard a bit about something called meshtastic" (I know it's a known thing around here) I volunteered to put together something to help my group of 6 keep track of each other if cell networks are congested at the festival.
Nothing is within any return windows which is good because I am probably going to ultimately shelve this decision until I've finished the antenna and understanding meshtastic better (or maybe meshcore) to make sure that I can explain it to my group.
The funny thing is that my outward efforts have motivated my youngest son (12) to want to build his first computer and he's decided to put Linux on it so ... Bonus!
That said, what do y'all think?