What would be good specs for small but power-efficient NAS. I want it to be budget friendly, I would probably look for 2nd hand stuff. I plan to use it for media storage (most likely immich) and the arr stack + jellyfin.
Give me suggestions
Probably something 7th gen Intel or newer so you can use Quicksync for transcoding on Jellyfin and HW accel on Immich for ML, face recognition, resizing, etc…
Tons of 7th/8th gen PCs pulled from offices on ebay for around $50-80, if you do some creative mounting inside a Midtower (MT) sized one you can fit a couple 3.5" drives and 2.5" SSDs.
On the budget side there is:
raspberry pi + usb RAID enclosure that can spin down the harddrive (I used icybox in the past)
Instead of a pi, it is also interesting to look at mini PCs like N97 or N100 which are super cheap nowadays, about the same as a rpi5 if you consider whats included / what addons you’d have to buy for the pi. Mini PC have more RAM, a build in nvme, a way beefier CPU. But their power efficiency is way worse.
Depends on how much horsepower you need or how energy efficient you want to be.
