NAS vs. refurbished server

Hi people, I have been looking for a NAS for quite a while now for my home network and I'm now facing a dilema.

I have a few checkboxes to tick to say "that's the right one":

[ ] can be mounted on rack
[ ] can be used as Plex server
[ ] supports 10gbit connection

I am also concerned about noise level as I'll be running this in my living room (no better spot yet) and energy consumption.

Option A: Buying an Actual NAS

I looked a bit into NAS with ARM CPUs as they are more energy-efficient, but they don't seem to bee suitable for video transcoding. Then I seem to be left with only some Synology options:

Option B: Buying a Rackmount Server

I then found a bunch of very interesting refurbished servers. Not going to show everything I found as it would be pointless, but here's an example:

DELL R630 8SFF

CPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 (12C 30M Cache 2.20 GHz)
RAM: 32Gb 2x16GB DDR4 RDIMM 2133MHz
RAID Controller: Dell RAID H730
Power Supply: 1xPS 750w
Price: 865 EUR

I could even go with lower specs for the purpose of a NAS.

Question

Can you folks please help me look for the right things? Do you have any suggestions? Any other places I could be looking at?

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7 comments

I can speak to the Synology RS1221+ as I own two. They are great NASs but they are terrible at compute/transcode.

You missed an important detail which is how much data do you need to store?

Those big servers are nice and powerful if you can stomach the power bill.

My current setup is the two Synology's in an HA pair for storage with a pair of similar spec Hyve servers for compute. If you're looking for an all in one unit, the big server is the way to go.
- Oh I’d say not a lot of data at the moment. I have two 14 TB disks which I use as replicas. So I have 14 TB of total capacity roughly. I think a 4-bay NAS is good enough for start

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