I am looking for building a NAS with used hardware, mostly for media, because my current Dell 7050 only has a 500gb hdd and I am tired of running low on space constantly.
I have a few questions:
I am currently running containers for Jellyfin, Radarr and Sonarr, if I buy a new machine for NAS, it makes sense to migrate every media-related container to the NAS drive, correct? The Dell machine I have has a 7th gen Intel CPU, that is able to transcode H265 perfectly, which is a big bonus. So if I end up moving it, the machine I buy needs to do the same, I suppose.
If so, then I guess using TrueNAS is not the way to go, and instead use a simple debian or ubuntu server distro for simple sharing?
If TrueNAS is the answer, then I should aim for ECC ram. If that's the case, I am not aware of cheap/budget workstations that have ECC ram, but if you have recommendations for one, great;
If you think I should instead buy something with an i3/i5/i7 or Ryzen processor, what kind of machines would you recommend?
I was looking to find something for around 150/200€, excluding hard drives. Not sure if that is possible.
Why Unraid in particular? I know it's a paid OS, which makes me wonder why go that route. I think I would rather have a simples SMB share in a linux environment, instead of paying for something like that.
The community documentation is really good; this makes it super easy to find out how to do something or fix an issue. Adding a drive is super easy , and doesn’t require all the drives to be the same size, you can mix and match. It also supports docker on top of all of that. If you’re willing to manage all of that yourself from scratch , then I doubt you’d like it. It’s convenient for most people that don’t want to spend a lot of time managing and troubleshooting their nas.