Building my own PC or just buy a NAS?

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demeter23

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#319021 14-Mar-2025 11:12

Hi all, I've always toiled with the idea of building my own PC, but just never took the plunge to do so.

I've upgraded many a machine over the years, and that's always been fine, but something about building my own has been pretty daunting.

I'm not a gamer, or require anything special, just want something that'll do me well for quite awhile and allow me to store (ideally) 4x 3.5 inch drives as well as a couple of NVMEs on the board.

I had considered a NAS, in particular the Asustor Lockerstor 4 Gen 2 (c. $1100) to feed an older NUC I already have, but part of me thinks I'm better building my own machine?

Should I go with the NAS, or jump in and try and build my own machine……someone please convince me either way! Thanks!

reven

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#3353906 14-Mar-2025 11:21

I would recommend unRAID and building it yourself. Gives you access to a very nice app store and lets you install plex etc on it. Prebuilt NASs eventually become ewaste, where unRAID you can just keep upgrading as needed, the entire hw may change, but if you do it piece by piece, your install wont change, so all your configuration/apps etc will remain working and exactly the same.

unRAID lets you mix and match HDDs as well, so can use 2x4tb and 2x6tb and get 4 + 4+ 6 TB of space (one drive, largest, is used for parity).

Been a happy unRAID user for about 15 years now.

demeter23

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#3353910 14-Mar-2025 11:49

Thanks Reven, I do keep reading about UnRaid but have zero experience with it. Assume you build a standard machine and install that as the OS?

reven

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#3353912 14-Mar-2025 11:50

yeah started off as just a HP machine with some hardrives i think then just grew from there. atm i have a 20 bay 4u unit. its an OS that can grow with you. one of the reasons its so nice.

demeter23

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#3353916 14-Mar-2025 12:09

Cheers, will consider it. I think getting the right spec at a good price is the first hurdle, then actually building it...

Mehrts

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#3353934 14-Mar-2025 13:20

Consider using an ex-lease business computer for such a task, such as HP Elitedesks.

They're cheap to buy, really light on power usage, and there's plenty of spare parts available if needed.

They also support NVMe drives via a PCIe adaptor.

I started with an Elitedesk 800G2 before moving to a Z440 workstation for my home server duties, and that was purely because I needed more PCIe lanes.

That same Elitedesk is being used as my standard PC now.
It draws 40-50w of power at idle with it running an i7-6700, 32GB RAM, an NVMe drive, and a GTX 1650 GPU. Max chat under stress tests (which is never seen in real-world applications, is only 160w.