[faeriechangling]

Embedded SOCs like AMDs which are used by Synology etc such as AMD V2000.

If you want to step up to being able to serve an entire case or 4U of HDDs, you’re going to need pcie lanes though, in which case w680 with i5-12600k and a single ecc udimm and a SAS HBA in the pcie slot with integrated Ethernet is probably as low wattage as you can get. Shame w680 platform cost is so high, am4/zen2 is cheaper to the point of still being viable.

You can also get Xeon, embedded Xeon, am5, am4 (without an iGPU).

There’s nothing inherently wrong with running a raid without ecc for 5 years, people do it all the time and things go fine.

[eisa01]

Been thinking to just get a Synology with ECC support, but what I find weird is that the CPUs they use are 5+ years old. Feels wrong to buy something like that “new”

Same with TrueNas mini

[faeriechangling]

For the most part, these are computers which are meant to stick around through 2-4 upgrade cycles of your other computers. Just doing various low power 24/7 tasks like file serving.

You could be like “well that’s stupid, I’m going to make a balls to the wall build server that also serves storage with recent components” but the build server components will become obsolete faster then the storage components, it can lead to incidental complexity to try and run something like windows games on a NAS operating system because you tried to consolidate on one computer, being forced to use things like ECC will compromise absolute performance, you’ll want to have the computer by your desk potentially but also in a closet since it has loud storage, you’re liable to run out of pcie lanes and slots, you want to use open cooling for the high performance components and a closed case for the spinning rust, it’s all a bit awkward.

Much simpler is to just treat the NAS as an appliance that serves files, maybe runs a plex server, some surveillance, a weather station, rudimentary monitoring, and home automation. Things for which something like a v2000 is overkill. Then use breeding edge chips in things like cell phones and laptops. Then have the two computers do different jobs. Longer product cycles between processors makes things like support cheaper to maintain for long term periods of time and offer low prices.

[hypercube33]

I have a 3u Nas I built in 2012 or something with a two core sempron running windows and using storage spaces and it still holds up just fine.

[cpncrunch]

It depends what your requirements are. Ive been using a low end synology box for years as a home dev server and it is more than adequate.

[dannyw]

Serving files is not compute intensive at all.