Last year I bought a 4bay WTR PRO NAS with an N100. It idles at 13W, after some tuning (mostly putting drives to sleep after ~10min of inactivity). I briefly looked into TrueNAS/unraid, but I ended up installing plain Debian, with ZFS, pCloud for remote backups and running everything on plain docker (in my case samba, HASS, jellyfin, kodi, rutorrent and some custom apps of my own). All in all it took me about 8 hours to setup, and 0 issues since. 100% satisfied with my setup.

I've been using a CS381 for years which sadly now is EoL, don't know if they're replaced it, but it's an excellent case. Previously I was using a Fractal Node 304 but that was cumbersome for drive maintenance.

It has 8 hot-swappable SAS bays (also SATA compatible) and I run a Ryzen 9 3900X in 65W eco mode on an AsRock Rack X470 board which has another 8-12 SATA ports (can't remember the exact number, not used because I use an HBA for the bays), so connectivity for storage is high. There's 2 spaces for SATA SSDs on top of the drive bays and you could fit more in various spots if you tried, and 2 NVMe slots on the motherboard.

Also got a single-slot nvidia GPU in there and a 4-port Gb NIC to supplement the 3 existing Gb ports on the board itself (one is dual-purpose for IPMI), some models of the AsRock rack have dual 10G ports too.

It runs most of the time at around 90W which I think is exceptionally low for the performance available, and can go to about double that when the GPU is in use, still very reasonable.

I would say cases like the Fractal Node 304 or something like the HL4 / HL8 from 45homelab would be the best suited candidates.

Regarding mainboards - models from CWWK with lots of SATA ports have been trendy lately. But there are reports of problems. The other options are either using some obscure supermicro mainboards with lots of ports or using a HBA for expansion.

I want to mention a possible middle ground here: UGreen NAS Storage. All but the smallest model come the OS on a seperate M.2 drive. If you disable the watchdog in BIOS, you can use the models like a normal Server This would give you:

* 3x M.2 slots * 4, 6 or 8 SATA bays * N100 (4 bay), Pentium Gold 8505 (4 bay), i5-1235u (6 & 8 bay)

The M.2 slots are connected rather slow, but good enough for OS/app drives.

For example, my plan for the next NAS would be the 4-Slot N100 variant with TrueNAS. One M.2 SSD for boot, Two M.2 SSDs for Apps/Server duties in mirroring and the 4 drives in Raid-Z1.

I have the Jonsbo N1 on my Amazon “DIY NAS” list.

However, once my DS415+ dies, I’m currently more inclined to go with a TerraMaster F4-423 NAS and replace their OS with something else. I’ve read that this TerraMaster model is basically an Intel NUC with a SATA card. And their OS is on a flash drive plugged into an internal USB port - so, very easy to change/replace.

I’ve also read that UGREEN devices should be easy to replace the OS on. So, that’s another option I keep in mind.

If you're fine losing the NVMe slots to NVMe-SATA, I recently found this: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1737570-thinknas-6x-hdd-nas...

Requires a bit of tinkering but the idea of plugging a 1L-format computer to turn it into a multi-disk NAS is quite attractive.

I wanted a small form factor for my homebrew NAS and Jonsbo N3 is the case I ended up with a couple of years ago. I couldn't find anything smaller that would let me have at least 6 disks. The Asus ITX motherboard I bought second hand had only 4 SATA ports and I bought a m.2 sata adapter to get an additional 4 ports.

Find a generation or two old Supermicro motherboard, don't bother with the AMD ones as they're rare and seemed to have more issues. I also would stay away from fly by night Chinese vendors for a lot of reasons but people tolerate them I guess. No idea on the PSU.

I use samba on Debian Linux running on a Mac Mini. The data partition lives on an externally connected Samsung SSD. It's probably not what you want, but it sure is small.

Assume that's an Intel Mac Mini?

Don't know any by heart, but when I was researching for myself recently, this is what I did.

Go to your favorite computer parts retailer website. Go to the Computer Cases category. Filter by desired number of 3.5" bays. Pick from the lot.

its not the smallest, but the Fractal Node 304 is nice IMHO.

I'm using that case with with a 200mm fan front-panel mod[1]. Despite its size, it gets pretty cramped. It's just hard to keep it organized without a dedicated SATA backplane.

[1]: https://www.printables.com/model/866109-200mm-fan-front-for-...

true, but I'm also not a fan of backplanes, so I just deal with it.

If I were starting from scratch I would look into those aliexpress motherboards that run laptop cpus.

Should save a lot on power and have plenty of muscle for anything you throw at them if you're willing to gamble on the hardware quality.

Jonsbo N4 works really well for me. One downside is that the space for PCI cards provides only about half a standard height, so GPU choice is very limited. Low profile Arc A310 fits like a glove but is pretty hard to find these days