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:

• Synology RackStation RS1221+
• Synology RS822RP+

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?