Thought I'd share my build I recently completed recently. I was running a dell optiplex with a few external hard drives as my back end stores and honestly it worked absolutely fine. Primarily just used for streaming to be honest (plex) but I wanted a larger store so thought I'd built something custom as the ugreen nas's etc didn't really... Impress me much and if they did, they cost an unreal amount for something that's quite limited.
So spec wise we have 6C/12T, 32GB ram, currently 24TB(16 usable), I did have 5 x 8 as the case supports it but 2 of the drives were bad so sent them back and honestly I don't need that much storage yet anyway so it wouldve been a waste of money. Found them on amazon resale luckily and bought the last ones, great deal, the drives I kept had like 9 hours power on, manufactured within the last few months and with warranty for 3 years from Western digital.
Parts list as far as I can remember:
Gigabyte h610i itx Intel 14100 Western digital red plus 3 x 5 Jonsbo N1 case Noctua NH-L12s cpu cooler Corsair Vengeance LPX 2 x16(old sticks I had, sold the other 2 I had was originally a set of 4 x 16) IO crest 4 port Sata card Samsung 850 500GB SSD(old one I had lying around) Samsung 860 evo pro 500GB Nvme ssd(old one I had lying around) Sata III super slim cables (they look like shoelaces, they're great) Corsair sf750 (I wanted lower power but couldn't find one so settled on this)
That's pretty much it I think, running Ubuntu server, full arr stack, qbitorrent and mullvad vpn sidecar, plex + cloudflare, immich and nextcloud, veracrypt, rclone for certain documents and photos to Google drive as my offsite backup and some microservices I wrote to manage clamav easier etc via a gui. I opted for kubernetes as I know it anyway. I feel like it's also way more portable etc. The whole build overall is pretty quiet, I work in the same room, Its near enough silent, temps are never above 40C, usually bounce between 25-35C, the case is nice and small and nice to work with, highly recommend
Been running solidly for the past couple weeks, zero issues.
