Question Home NAS and available options

[yvxs]

I have recently picked up a pre-loved mini pc from HP and upgraded it with few readily available hardware with me. The system is quite solid with i5 12 gen (10 cores and 10 threads) and 32 Gig of RAM. Its come with one NVME slot, multiple USB2 and USB3 ports but lacks SATA ports for me to boost up the storage. It has EA WIFI card and one p60 HDD slot (few questions on these later). What are the options for me to boost the storage capacity of this system as I plan to use this as a NAS+ PLEx (or JellyFin for better) , I am looking at RAID5 with at least 40 TB storage and one dedicated media drive (preferably SSD). I will be installing Ubuntu 22.04.

Here what I have thought through but need expert recommendations

1. The P60 HDD I guess is a regular hdd slot where I can use this to plug in a HDD, I have ordered one to check and I plan to get a 10 TB HDD with this one
2. Only NVME boot is available in this model, but I am planning to get a 4TB NVME and booth the main drive, use around 3.5TB for the storage (Media mostly, but this will not be enough for a long run)
3. I don't need WIFI so plan to get a EA to SATA adapter and get two additional drives (Fitting them in would be a real challenge as I need to have Three 2.5 HDD /SSD now), I hope there won't be any limitations in terms of capacity as I plan to get 10 TB each here

Is there any other way I can significantly and easily achieve the 40 TB mark. Is it ok to have external drives attached (docking some how via ethernet or USB but I am not looking at full features NAS)?

Any suggestions and thoughts please?

 

[Viking2121]

I don't even think they make a 10 TB in a 2.5 inch drive, if they do, I can't see them ever being worth it, But either way you would still have to power the drives, either some really janky adapter that would most likely be too much for the power brick, or some other external power source further making things complicated and not as reliable.

In my opinion, I'd scrap that idea to make that your NAS, You really don't want to use USB drives, I mean it will work, but USB is not reliable. In all honesty, I'd go find or build a different system for NAS work loads, something with a little more flexibility with drive options. You could find a micro ATX board that will work with that CPU, and a case with out some crazy jankyness.

If you are dead set on making that your NAS, make sure you do have another back up, but you probably should find an external source of power for more drives if you replace that wifi card with a sata card, them power bricks are already pretty much maxed out with just what it powers normally.

Good Luck!

 

[yvxs]

I don't even think they make a 10 TB in a 2.5 inch drive, if they do, I can't see them ever being worth it, But either way you would still have to power the drives, either some really janky adapter that would most likely be too much for the power brick, or some other external power source further making things complicated and not as reliable.

In my opinion, I'd scrap that idea to make that your NAS, You really don't want to use USB drives, I mean it will work, but USB is not reliable. In all honesty, I'd go find or build a different system for NAS work loads, something with a little more flexibility with drive options. You could find a micro ATX board that will work with that CPU, and a case with out some crazy jankyness.

If you are dead set on making that your NAS, make sure you do have another back up, but you probably should find an external source of power for more drives if you replace that wifi card with a sata card, them power bricks are already pretty much maxed out with just what it powers normally.

Good Luck!

Thanks for suggestion @Viking2121, I have seen few 10TB 2.5 inch floating around but your comment on power supply does make sense. Its a powerful machine and will see what best I can do with it. If not NAS, I am looking at an NVR option too with Ubuntu and Shinobi and say around 4tb of ssd and 4tb of nvme its worth a try. I have a full nas built with e5 and dual x99 MB, but honestly these are power hungry machines and I am trying to build something for home which is less on power and ok on performance. Regards, Y