A while back I realized that I had actually completely run out of storage; my combined 5TB across multiple drives had completely filled up. Having become a data hoarder myself, I knew that I had to go out and buy more storage at once. After all, the biggest sin you can commit is deleting data you aren’t absolutely sure you will never need again. If you do, eventually you will realize that you do actually need it again, whether it be immediately afterward, the next day, or even a few months down the road.

But just buying more storage is much easier said than done. My main workstation machine had actually completely used up all the available SATA ports (at least, the ones that actually worked), and I knew that I was going to have to either buy a larger drive and move all my data over, or build an entirely new NAS. One of my biggest priorities going into this project was my interest in setting up a home streaming server, that being a combination of [Jellyfin], [Stremio], managing torrents and other miscellaneous services. Given that our ISP had just recently upgraded us for free to a better plan, this meant that I could finally host a Minecraft server without being our up-link being saturated, and causing network lag. Having so many requirements meant that my priorities when picking out the components for my NAS/server combo was quite different from a traditional NAS build.

Please note that I don’t have any prior experience to build a NAS, and as such don’t really know what I am doing. Each component that I picked out was very specialized to my exact needs, and this shouldn’t be taken as a recommendation for you to exactly do what I did!