They bring back memories of My first NAS I bought, I enjoyed it so much I bought 2 and they are still working, which I built back in around 2013. Mine still have the stock fans, whisper quiet. Pics with the GPU is off the net, just to show you can add one up to 320mm
Not sure if any of you remember the Lian Li PC-Q25.
This case was my first NAS case I got and built, if was a fun little case, maxed them out with 2 TB, then got some 3TB when they came out.
I still have them and they are still running to this day.
Not comparing them to Homelab, just brought back some great memories. Now I am enjoying my 2 HL15’s
My first “NAS” was a mac mini with 4 external hard drives hooked up to it.
I later moved to a tower running unRAID with an Intel 8700k processor. Currently 5 spinning rust disks including parity and a Western Digital 1TB pcie SSD. It is starting to show its age.
My first NAS was a build in a Fractal Node 304 in 2013. Gigabyte Z77 motherboard, Intel 3470S CPU for low TDP, and 4 TB drives. It ran Windows 7 with Stablebit Drivepool to merge the disks into one large pool with redundancy.
Before that I did a lot of work travel, so my data was spread across a collection of external 2.5 inch drives I could connect to my laptop individually.
A year or two later I added an external USB JBOD enclosure to the Node 304, but it wasn’t very reliable, disks would drop randomly out of the pool. At that point I didn’t know getting used enterprise gear off of eBay was a thing, and somehow (don’t remember, maybe read something about Backblaze) found out about 45Drives in about 2016.
Building in the ARK case was terrible. The stock CPU cooler didn’t quite fit under the drive cage so I had to modify it slightly. Trying to do anything in that case was just a pain. I really wanted a motherboard with eSATA so I could expand via a JBOD enclosure in the future.
I looked at number of NAS operating systems but chose NAS4Free as it could run on a USB drive and seemed to offer the most plugin options at the time. It eventually stopped working with my hardware around 2021. That’s when I switched over to some used enterprise servers with a HP DL380 G7 running TrueNAS. A few years later I switched to Dell R520 and then finally the HL15 Full Build I’m using now.
My first NAS was a Raspberry Pi 3B with two SATA SSD’s attached via USB adapters. I even had a slick little cage/case for it. It ran OpenMediaVault. The only thing was you couldn’t have USB drives in a raid array, so I used Rclone to copy data from one drive to the other so I had two copies of my data.
