551
Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
(www.howtogeek.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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I somehow doubt that.
My last desktop PC has been retasked as an HTPC. The CPU in it requires a graphics card for the system to POST, it's currently mounted in a SFF case with barely room for two 2.5" drives, so it would either make for a shitty, difficult to service, bulky for what it does, power inefficient NAS, or I'd have to buy a new case and CPU.
My current machine is in an mATX mini-tower, there's room for hard disks and the 7700X has integrated graphics so I could haul the GPU out, but it's still kind of bulky for what you'd get.
So I'm gonna keep my Synology in service for a little while longer, then build a NAS from scratch selecting components that would be good for that purpose.
This is my rig, I already bought 20 30TB disks, how do I proceed?
Your system is a POS.
First choose a version of linux to install on it, then you can proceed.
Atm it's running Proxmox, but I'll go bare metal with a fresh install of Hannah Montana Linux, I want to do things proper this time!
I operate my hard drives totally external to my old PC's case with a 3D printed holder keeping them together (with a little space between each drive for ventilation). It's a little ugly, but it lives in a closet so I don't really care how it looks. More importantly with my old Neatgear NAS I didn't realize just how much speed I was missing out on. I guess with a modern Synology unit with a SSD cache you'll likely get similar performance, but it's so convenient to be able to run Docker containers and VMs on the same machine.
My UnRAID server is an HP desktop machine from 2011. More than capable of running dozens of services without tons of storage.