Just beware of too old hardware that may end up costing more than expected because of their power draw. A NAS usually stays up 24/7 and power saving and reliability become important. I would also avoid anything with a fan, particularly if they expect it to be running constantly. A mini PC with enough internal space to host a long m.2 SATA adapter (0) can become a quite compact solution; many used low performance Celeron based systems considered obsolete for desktop stuff would be more than enough for that task.

0: https://www.ebay.com/itm/256268302567

(no relation with the seller, just found searching "6xsata m.2" and removing those with lower feedback ratings). There are also 5xsata similar cards.

When people talk about using these cards with the minipc how do they imagine setting these up? shuck the minipc out of its original case and zip tie it (no clue if its standard mobo probably not) to some case that can hold these drives and a psu? hack a hole out of the minipc and run the cabling to some cage of drives, powered by a separate psu?

The boards sizes aren't standard, however drilling holes to fix them into a bigger case isn't that hard, same for power supplies. As for the disks, there are backplanes with SATA connectors that can host for example 5x3.5" drives into a 3x5.25" bay (0), so that the NAS can be pretty solid. Unfortunately they aren't cheap but the overall cost would be still lower than buying a new NAS with comparable features and performance.

0: https://www.reichelt.de/de/en/mobile-rack-3x-5-25-for-5x-3-5...

You think you even need sata for a nas, or would an external bay with usbc be enough for spinning rust?

USBc works perfectly wrt speed, but in my case I learned the hard way that there are some caveats.

My current NAS is a mini PC connected to a external 8-bay USB3 enclosure with disks arranged as 4 ZFS mirror pools. It worked like charm with XigmaNAS (FreeBSD based) until the day I needed to add some files and the best solution was of course to connect another external USB disk to go faster than network transfer. As I connected the drive, suddenly all disks in the pools were shifted, with the external disk becoming part of the 1st pool, and all others mixed, with potentially devastating consequences. Of course I panicked and after a series of wrong moves destroyed the 1st pool which luckily I already had a very recent backup of. On BSD forums they explained that the embedded XigmaNAS edition does not make use of UUIDs so it's dependent on the order disks are being detected, which frankly shocked me: I wouldn't expect that from FreeBSD. Now, the detection order in case of the disk enclosure is always the same, but should I connect some other external drive, the disk order would go bonkers again, therefore I also feared what could happen if a disk suddenly becomes undetectable. However, it's only the web interface that goes out of sync wrt disk detection, and I later learned it can be fixed with the synchronize command. They say the full install is immune from that, and I plan to migrate everything, but I'd like to be sure I can do that transparently before embarking in that task.

It seems odd to me that there's no ARM-based NAS with SSDs on the market, to focus on minimum power consumption rather than maximum read/write speeds.

The Kobol Helios64 was one, but they stopped development a few years ago. It is fully Open Source, and I still hope someone could take on the work because it could become a really interesting product.

https://kobol.io/

From memory it had a built in backup battery too

Yes, quite innovative and useful especially against outages during resyncs, although I'm not sure I'd want lithium cells inside a NAS.

There is the CM3588 board [0] from FriendlyElec. LinusTechTips made a video about it. I just can't find a nice case for it. I've asked MyElectronics about it and they said they would consider making a case if they get enough requests.

[0] https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...

[1] https://myelectronics.nl/

That’s what’s a bit wild about this project.

It’s an amazing project. I’m floored that it all works and that the author figured it out.

But still, I’ve never fully understood the appeal of using some of these custom design NAS products when a standard ATX computer is so much more customizable, modular, expandable, repairable, etc.

And many of these NAS systems are such a ripoff on pricing.

I don’t think desktop power consumption is all that bad if you’re careful about component selection.

Another alternative is to have one more performant system that runs a bunch of different things in virtual machines so that the NAS functionality is only a small part of the power consumption.

Now that I live in a house it’s sorta a no brainer to just get an ATX case and build my own, but in my apartment days something smaller would’ve been more appealing

The legit reason is that you don't want your storage tied in with compute. For a business, I get it. Home lab? I agree, I don't really get it.

I don't get it either. Isn't a NAS just a normal computer with a ton of SATA ports as well as physical space for all the disks? Even consumer PCs have hot swap bays.

I get what you are saying. But the 'up and running' is dead easy with these NAS boxes. They are wickedly plug and play. Where a DIY version is fun and interesting to do, but takes some configuring and fiddling and researching. Not necessarily hard just something I did not really want to mess with. Spin on about 10 years and now I am considering DIY. But for other reasons (like you point out). Storage is no longer my primary sole use case. Which means a bit more DIY on the next one.

It for me was just a mater of how much time/effort did I want to sink into it. I just wanted a large storage system. A off the shelf NAS I can be up and running in 2-3 hours. For DIY there is the research time for parts (including the drives), cases, and which software to run (there are 3-4 decent choices). Then gluing it all together. Probably 2-3 days for me fiddling around with it and research time.

Take the one I went with synology. The one I picked was in the 600 dollar range for the case. By the time your done picking a decently powered board, case and memory and cpu. You are in the same ballpark of cost for similar perf. The package was all done. I did not have to do much (notice a theme?). My most expensive part of the build? The drives themselves.

The downside is now I want something like 2.5g (or better) and the particular one I picked has zero way to upgrade (other than ripping the thing apart and hoping the right drivers are in there). It is about trade offs. Did I really want the possibility of upgrade or up and running quickly. Remember this is not something I do all the time. It is something I do every 3-4 years so I have to refamiliarize myself with all the different possible parts. Plus getting the OS in there 'just right'. Not impossible or even hard. I just chose a different trade off.