Replacing NAS With Windows PC - Need Recommended Custom-Build Site

Marie SWE said:

Consider win server or LTCE workstation so you get an LTSC version that will be long term stable instead of pro that is a rolling version that will have bad uprolls as it have had in the past. it will get in the future.... as MS wont change its approach on pushing updates that isn't really ready to be pushed.

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What would you recommend for a minimum NAS system? I dont need one but it would be something to do.
I see a Dell PowerEdge T110 Server - Intel Xeon Quad X3430-2.4GHz - 8GB RAM, 4 x 300GB SAS on eBay for $100 but at 95 watts it might cost $600 in electricity in 2-3 years if I leave it turned on.

john1955 said:

What would you recommend for a minimum NAS system? I dont need one but it would be something to do.
I see a Dell PowerEdge T110 Server - Intel Xeon Quad X3430-2.4GHz - 8GB RAM, 4 x 300GB SAS on eBay for $100 but at 95 watts it might cost $600 in electricity in 2-3 years if I leave it turned on.

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It all depends on its usage and your network.
How fast is your Lan. 1Gbit, 2,5Gbit.. etc.
What do you plan to use. Only network storage or to run VM's on and other services.
Do you want to use the platform as a steppingstone for learning.

A lot of people doing home labs have started to scale down to save the electric bill using NUCs and mini PC's.
as for motherboard with a lot of disk connectors.. you can go for an I/O raid card instead, then you get more motherboard to choose from.
When running a server/nas and you want a big disk pool you want to minimize errors, so a full ECC system is a nice thing. More expensive, but more stable as you have the error correction. With SAS you also have ECC all the way in the system and it also have better speed then Sata as its full duplex channel instead of simplex that Sata is using.

as for recomending.. I'm not up to date on the latest hardware as i have not worked in IT for years now.
But this is the setup I'm working on for a low energy home-lab solution.
I have 7 laptop motherboards i plan on setting up as a cluster to get coputing power. Then i have one older mini PC that will act diskpool, so in that one i will use an LSI SAS raid controller for 8 disks, and i will run ZFS and raidz1.. of those eight drives will use 7 7200rpm HDD's(cmr) and one SSD for SLOG to get better performance on the pool. That way i get a lot of storage for low price, byt the pool shuld give around 9Gbit/s in speed so i will need a 10Gbit NIC and a 8port 10Gbit switch.. so with 1Gbit/laptop i get 7Gbit flow that the pool can handle at the same time.

But this is just a home-lab just because its fun to do stuff with old hardware people have upgraded from.. not that i have any real usage for it. *LOL*

So it all boils down to.. what will you use the NAS for and how much "fun" are you looking for? or is it no fun involed at all and just a practical usecase.

Marie SWE said:

It all depends on its usage and your network.
How fast is your Lan. 1Gbit, 2,5Gbit.. etc.
What do you plan to use. Only network storage or to run VM's on and other services.
Do you want to use the platform as a steppingstone for learning.

A lot of people doing home labs have started to scale down to save the electric bill using NUCs and mini PC's.
as for motherboard with a lot of disk connectors.. you can go for an I/O raid card instead, then you get more motherboard to choose from.
When running a server/nas and you want a big disk pool you want to minimize errors, so a full ECC system is a nice thing. More expensive, but more stable as you have the error correction. With SAS you also have ECC all the way in the system and it also have better speed then Sata as its full duplex channel instead of simplex that Sata is using.

as for recomending.. I'm not up to date on the latest hardware as i have not worked in IT for years now.
But this is the setup I'm working on for a low energy home-lab solution.
I have 7 laptop motherboards i plan on setting up as a cluster to get coputing power. Then i have one older mini PC that will act diskpool, so in that one i will use an LSI SAS raid controller for 8 disks, and i will run ZFS and raidz1.. of those eight drives will use 7 7200rpm HDD's(cmr) and one SSD for SLOG to get better performance on the pool. That way i get a lot of storage for low price, byt the pool shuld give around 9Gbit/s in speed so i will need a 10Gbit NIC and a 8port 10Gbit switch.. so with 1Gbit/laptop i get 7Gbit flow that the pool can handle at the same time.

But this is just a home-lab just because its fun to do stuff with old hardware people have upgraded from.. not that i have any real usage for it. *LOL*

So it all boils down to.. what will you use the NAS for and how much "fun" are you looking for? or is it no fun involed at all and just a practical usecase.

Click to expand...

Took me a while to look it up but it seems my LAN speed for my Verizon Fios Router model 9100EM
(also known as the Westell UltraLine Series3 9100EM) is only 100 Mbps so I guess I need more hardware than I thought.

john1955 said:

Took me a while to look it up but it seems my LAN speed for my Verizon Fios Router model 9100EM
(also known as the Westell UltraLine Series3 9100EM) is only 100 Mbps so I guess I need more hardware than I thought.

Click to expand...

100/100 Mbit is a bit low, but if you only have a 100Mbit internet connection and dont plan on getting faster internet. You can just get a small switch 1Gbit or 2,5Gbit you hook up to the router and then all your devices as desktop, laptop and nas to the switch to get higher internal speed. But then you is locked to wired Lan only as your router wifi cant do that speed over to the LAN

john1955 said:

Took me a while to look it up but it seems my LAN speed for my Verizon Fios Router model 9100EM
(also known as the Westell UltraLine Series3 9100EM) is only 100 Mbps so I guess I need more hardware than I thought.

Click to expand...

Verizon will give you a faster router if you buy faster speeds.
They want to look good on speed tests. ^^

I pay for 300/300... I only use one computer so I don't use a router.
I run CAT6e straight from the ONT to the computer.





More info...
The following website(s) are the successor to DSL Reports which ended in 2025.


And particularly...

Marie SWE said:

100/100 Mbit is a bit low, but if you only have a 100Mbit internet connection and dont plan on getting faster internet. You can just get a small switch 1Gbit or 2,5Gbit you hook up to the router and then all your devices as desktop, laptop and nas to the switch to get higher internal speed. But then you is locked to wired Lan only as your router wifi cant do that speed over to the LAN

Click to expand...

I'm already wired, I only use the WiFi for my phone or I would turn it off so I should look into that. Maybe I could use my old Dell Vostro laptop, I dont use it for anything else any more. I almost forgot I had it. It's only got 2GB RAM (but I can buy 4GB for $16) and an Intel Core 2 Duo T7100.

john1955 said:

Took me a while to look it up but it seems my LAN speed for my Verizon Fios Router model 9100EM
(also known as the Westell UltraLine Series3 9100EM) is only 100 Mbps so I guess I need more hardware than I thought.

Click to expand...

Marie SWE said:

100/100 Mbit is a bit low, but if you only have a 100Mbit internet connection and dont plan on getting faster internet. You can just get a small switch 1Gbit or 2,5Gbit you hook up to the router and then all your devices as desktop, laptop and nas to the switch to get higher internal speed. But then you is locked to wired Lan only as your router wifi cant do that speed over to the LAN

Click to expand...

john1955 said:

I'm already wired, I only use the WiFi for my phone or I would turn it off

Click to expand...

Everything on my network is on WiFi. When I switched to a fibre to the house ISP I only paid for 150Mbps, but the Adtran 854-v6 router they supplied can achieve up to 250Mbps for my internal network.

Marie SWE said:

That i totally understand.
There is two reasons for go way overkill.. For education purposes and the second one, the pure nerd factor.. just because i can.
as 16GB ram and HDD's 7200rpms in raid5/6 would work fine up to 2.5Gbit Lan.. Sata3 SSD's up to almost 25Gbit Lan.
But for the nerd factor.. Then i just say.. Go for it.
Consider win server or LTSC workstation so you get an LTSC version that will be long term stable instead of pro that is a rolling version that will have bad uprolls as it have had in the past. it will get in the future.... as MS wont change its approach on pushing updates that isn't really ready to be pushed.

Click to expand...

I was bored and just happened to be paging through the dictionary and I landed on the word "overkill." Next to it was a picture of a Windows Server and LTSC workstation!

Seriously, though, thanks for the helpful information.

But I truly have always just used my NAS as a file server to primarily store copies of my backup files and other important files/documents. Once in a while, something will "happen" that will make me enable the media server, but it's usually temporary--except a few months ago, when I bought a new TV and I ended up installing the Plex Media Server on my QNAP for better integration with my TV (it has the Plex app installed).

I do my weekly backups on Fridays and once the files are copied to the NAS, I usually just power it off, unless I anticipate streaming content from it over the weekend. It's a very important server for me and I have it setup as RAID5.

The problem is that I have had it with QNAP making me struggle and/or find hacks/workarounds and/or give up functionality to integrate with my Microsoft 365 and Windows environments. They end-of-life their hardware too quickly and, when they do, it essentially means no more OS or app updates. Here's just one simple example: OneDrive upload file size limit is currently 250GB and the QNAP app is artificially limiting it to 10GB! I submitted a ticket and included that the app respects the GCP upload file size limit and it should do the same for OneDrive. Two+ years later, they have not addressed my ticket because my machine is EOL.

Solution: Rclone. That worked great...that is, until an upload exceeded 24 hours, causing the token to be invalidated, which then caused the upload to restart! All the recommended fixes I tried all failed and there's no way I was going to modify my backup app to start splitting files at 10GB (my biggest backup file is 140GB).

I can honestly say that my issues started when I decided to get more entrenched in the Microsoft ecosystem: I used to have GCP for my cloud environment and all my QNAP-to-GCP processes were working fine. It was only when I dropped GCP for M365 that my processes started to break or I'm having to find some sort of workaround.

So, I've just reached the point where I'm looking for one consistent OS and UI across my landscape, seamlessly using the same apps, scripts, etc. For example, with a Windows-based NAS, I can back it up using Macrium, just like I do for my laptops. That's why changing to Linux or TrueNAS or whatever isn't going to really help because I'm looking for a box that will seamlessly integrate into my landscape and that I can seamlessly manage like the other clients.

I have to admit that when I was younger, hacking and writing all sorts of scripts or whatever was fun, but now I'm old, simplicity is more important.

nuspieds said:

I was bored and just happened to be paging through the dictionary and I landed on the word "overkill." Next to it was a picture of a Windows Server and LTSC workstation!

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That was funny

Bree said:

Everything on my network is on WiFi. When I switched to a fibre to the house ISP I only paid for 150Mbps, but the Adtran 854-v6 router they supplied can achieve up to 250Mbps for my internal network.

Click to expand...

I would buy a router as I just dont need any faster internet than 50Mbps. A budget router is about $150 to $175.

john1955 said:

I'm already wired, I only use the WiFi for my phone or I would turn it off so I should look into that. Maybe I could use my old Dell Vostro laptop, I dont use it for anything else any more. I almost forgot I had it. It's only got 2GB RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo T7100.

Click to expand...

Me, too!

Many years ago, I had my contractor run ethernet cables under the house to the various rooms so that I could have wired connections via switches for my various devices. Today, my phone, refrigerator, kitchen faucet, and security cameras are the only ones that use the WiFi connection; however, that's all about to change this year when I complete some remodeling, cut all those cables, and plug their holes!

It is after 5:30 AM over here and i should have been offline at latest 5am so i can get some sleep before i need to get up again.

So i will drop i tomorrow (or later today depending on how you all defines time) to answer all posts.

Take care everyone and see you after my sleep and after my two cups of my morning-coffee

Marie SWE said:

It is after 5:30 AM over here and i should have been offline at latest 5am so i can get some sleep before i need to get up again.

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We are on opposite schedules . . . I go to bed at 8pm and get up at 4-5am but I was wide awake at 3:30am so I'm making coffee and then will go to the gym for an hour.

nuspieds said:

I've never been to a Micro Center but the closest one to me is 35 miles away.

But, oh, how I long for the days where I could run to RadioShack, CompUSA, Circuit City, The Good Guys, and Fry's!

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To add to the list, there use to be a TigerDirect store about 20 minutes from my house.

Winuser said:

To add to the list, there use to be a TigerDirect store about 20 minutes from my house.

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Yes!!!

I can't remember what issue I was having but at the time I was commuting to Florida for work and it was TigerDirect to the rescue!

nuspieds said:

Yes!!!

I can't remember what issue I was having but at the time I was commuting to Florida for work and it was TigerDirect to the rescue!

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I was sad when I heard that the TigerDirect store was closing. The building is now an animal hospital.

Beelink

hdmi said:

Beelink

Beelink | Beelink ME mini 6-slot Home Storage NAS Mini PC

www.bee-link.com

Click to expand...

Thanks!

I dabbled into the Mini PC world last year as a stopgap measure to perform the tasks that I would want my PC NAS to do. The Beelink definitely has the storage capacity I'm looking for, but my overall concern remains the CPU and (number and type of) ports.

Just recently, I had to buy a new laptop and I ended up replacing my Mini PC with my old laptop; it performs so much faster than the Mini PC. However, the form factor of the Mini PC is definitely a great selling point~

hdmi said:

Beelink

Beelink | Beelink ME mini 6-slot Home Storage NAS Mini PC

www.bee-link.com

Click to expand...

My media server runs off a BeeLink Mini Computer. It runs 24/7 without any hiccups

nuspieds said:

Thanks!

I dabbled into the Mini PC world last year as a stopgap measure to perform the tasks that I would want my PC NAS to do. The Beelink definitely has the storage capacity I'm looking for, but my overall concern remains the CPU and (number and type of) ports.

Just recently, I had to buy a new laptop and I ended up replacing my Mini PC with my old laptop; it performs so much faster than the Mini PC. However, the form factor of the Mini PC is definitely a great selling point~

Click to expand...

The Intel N150 CPU and 16GB DDR5 is powerful enough to run Windows 11 Pro with BitLocker Drive Encryption using XTS-AES 128-bit which allows the N150 CPU to use its AES-NI instruction set so BitLocker can keep up with the speed of a single 5G Ethernet connection (~625 MB/s) without getting seriously bogged down. The Beelink has an Intel I226-V controller with dual 2.5G Ethernet, but Windows doesn't support NIC bonding, BUT... the Beelink also has a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) port so, this will work: https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-Ethernet-Aluminum-Thunderbolt-Compatible/dp/B0DNSTHRGQ
The Realtek RTL8157 chip supports checksum offloading, it means that the N150 CPU will need to work a bit less hard during sustained transfers of large data over the 5G Ethernet connection. (Personally, I, wouldn't invest in 10G Ethernet network gear right now, but then, it isn't my choice to make, so...)

My suggestion: use StableBit DrivePool instead of Storage Spaces. Use Group Policy Editor to select XTS-AES 128-bit for BitLocker. Configure BitLocker Drive Encryption to encrypt only "Used Space". Ensure that TRIM is enabled on the SSDs for BitLocker. The 5G Ethernet connection (~625 MB/s) will still be the bottleneck with this setup, as even just a single M.2 MVMe PCIe 3.0 x1 slot already gives you ~850 MB/s. 10G Ethernet (~1,250 MB/s) would saturate the 400GB pSLC cache of the 2TB Crucial P310 in roughly five and a half minutes, but as the drive fills up, the pSLC cache gets smaller, and, once this cache saturates, the drive enters a folding state of ~310 MB/s (in PCIe 3.0 mode) or ~336 MB/s (in PCIe 4.0 mode) sustained write speed, AND the drive is slow to recover from this. The 2TB P310 cannot hold a candle against the 2TB Samsung 990 EVO Plus (which, currently, sets you back ~$323 a pop on Amazon), but neither can a single 10G Ethernet connection. With or without throwing in a lot faster CPU and extra RAM, that is.