Im in the market for a NAS solution. By NAS I don’t mean running Jellyfin and some homepage thing for vibes, I mean your old-style “it just provides network attached storage”.
I love the Jonsbo cases but I don’t want to drop as much coin as building out a NAS based on one of them entails. I’m looking for an older office/home/gaming PC or case that has room for atleatst 4 3.5" HDD’s. Something around ten years old with maybe an i5 7th+ gen CPU. I don’t need hardware RAID as I prefer ZFS anyway.
Ideas?
The Fractal Design Define R cases can house a lot of hard drives, but they are kind of big. My Define R6 can theoretically house 11 3.5" drives iirc in addition to 4x 2.5" but it does not come with that many drive sleds out of the box. For the 2.5" drives only 2 sleds are included. I think for the 3.5" it was about 6.
They can also look for older R models, used. I have an R2 Arc Mini that can do 6 drives and it’s not too big.
You can also mount 2.5" drives into the 3.5: trays if you wanted. Ive had my R6 for years now and just bought a 2-pack of drive caddies as it filled up to the point that I now have enough to fill the whole case.
Not exactly cheaper to get than a Jonsbo case.