Question Can I use this high end gaming PC from 12 years ago for NAS with SSDs?

[DavidVioMC]

So I have my "high end" gaming PC from 12 years ago that I tucked away after I built a newer one at the time that I never got rid of and don't want to as that's my first ever gaming PC I built from scratch and first PC that I did a custom water cooling loop on so it has a lot of sentimental value and it's not worth that much. I would love to make a NAS out of it as it just sat for 12 years collecting dust. I'm not that into drives and RAIDs so I'm looking for some advice for best possible setup especially with a PC built years before M.2 took off. The specs are:
i5 - 2500k (OCed to 5Ghz) with EK Supremacy Elite waterblock
two EVGA GTX 680 in SLI with EK FC680 waterblocks
4x8GB HyperX Fury DDR3 1600MHz RAM
MSI P67A-GD55 (B3) Motherboard
No drives as I moved them to my new built PC at the time
It does have a EVGA PSU from 2011-2012 which I will end up replacing it with something modern that won't explode and with good efficiency.

Due to the case I used and the way the water loop is routed, there's no space for HDDs but there is mounting for up to twelve 2.5 SSDs. The mobo has six SATA ports, two are SATA3 and four are SATA2 and it has PCI-E Gen 2 so I know speeds are not going to be great which I'm ok with as I'm a indie game dev and I'll use it to backup source files between major releases so majority of the time I'll back up a source version and never touch it again.
Due to only having 6 SATA ports and wanting to run atleast RAID 1, I'm not going to get far, was wondering if getting a PCI-E card with extra SATA ports or PCI-E card with M.2 and use slower cheaper M.2 drives instead would be better? Or are there better solutions? It also only has three x1 slots available as the two x16 are taken by the 680's in SLI. My only requirements are that it needs to have some redundancy and it can't have HDDs, I have no budget so give me some ideas or come up with creative setups! Thanks!

P.S I'm aware the loop is also 12 years old, I already plan to replace as many O-rings as possible.

 

[punkncat]

IMO, at the age of this system and the energy and heat issues, alongside a risk from having water in your storage/backup solution this doesn't really seem suitable. Can it be done? Yes. Should it be done? Probably not.

Set it up in some manner of display and enjoy the sentimental value.

 

[USAFRet]

First off...Why RAID 1?
That is NOT, repeat NOT, a real backup scenario. It is only for continued uptime.
This thing, or whatever else you do, needs a real backup routine.

Could you turn this ancient thing into a NAS? Yeah, sort of.
I wouldn't.

SATA II ports will kill the performance whatever SATA SSDs you put in there.
Decade+ old custom wliquid cooling? Nope.
Ancient PSU.

Why the absolute restriction on HDDs?
A 2 or 4 bay real NAS, with some LARGE HDDs, will do exactly what you seem to need.

 

[QyInvoLing]

You may be worrying about stability days by days using an old platform

 

[stonecarver]

If we were car guys this would be that car we have up on blocks and we slowly spend our free weekends here and there taking it down to ground zero and rebuilding each part than reassembling. In the end it could breath life into the old girl and back to it's glory days.

Those water blocks are going to be the biggest project your going to face. Remove, dismantle and inspect. If not damaged and than clean them and like you said replace the seals, that part so far so good.

The pumps well that's another story . Maybe source new?

You have said your going to replace the power supply in your first post so that's taken care of.

Running the x2 GTX 680's is a bit much just for a NAS machine but the idle power consumption of the GTX 680 is between 15-25 watts per card so not to bad but just throwing that out there.

If this was my project I would flip the 2500K to an i7-2600. Why not your going to have it all apart doing the refurbish.

In the end you can have many uses for the old girl besides the NAS. Retro gaming rig that you can still run XP, Windows 7 or Windows 10 on and Windows 11 if you wanted to do the TMP bypass.

If you ever run it with XP or Windows 7 just consider it a non internet device.

 

[RAIDGoblin]

In the end you can have many uses for the old girl besides the NAS. Retro gaming rig that you can still run XP, Windows 7 or Windows 10 on and Windows 11 if you wanted to do the TMP bypass.

If you ever run it with XP or Windows 7 just consider it a non internet device.

I was just chipping in here to say this, but someone beat me to it! if it were mine I'd make it into a non-internet retro gaming rig, I know a few folks who have made up similar systems with XP, they meet for lan party's and pretend it's still the mid 2000's

that way your old machine would be properly appreciated for it's intended purpose

as for the server idea, it would work, you could, but it would probably use more power/generate more heat than you would want, my server is a really old passive cooled office PC chocked full of hard disks instead of a DVD drive, running a very power efficient linux distro (cant remember which one off the top of my head). You really don't need much PC power just to allow access to data over the network, you want something that runs cool, doesn't burn much power, is almost zero maintenance, and that your happy to leave on 24/7