I’m currently planning to build a low power nas for my upcoming minirack (10").

It’s going to store daily proxmox vm disk snapshots, some image files and some backups from my laptop, all via NFS. Plus some more in the future, but generally, it’s going to idle 95% of the day. Not decided on the OS yet, probably TrueNAS Core or OMV.

I already have an Olmaster 5,25" JBOD in which I’ll put 3 x 2,5" 2TB SSD via SATA. The JBOD needs a single Molex connector for powering all SSDs. So I need at least 3 SATA + Boot.

Some recherche led me to this post and I tend towards a similar build with a J4105-ITX (cheaper, probably little less power consumption, enough CPU ofr NAS).

These officially are limited to 8GB RAM but seem to work fine with more if you don’t update your BIOS which is not optimal but acceptable if everything else works fine. I’d like 16G for efficient ZFS but I guess even 8 are fine if it’s not doing much else (2GB base + almost 1 for each TB storage + OS), just don’t tell TrueNAS forum users.

While I don’t plan 10G ethernet now, the PCIe slot should leave that possibility open.

I read good things about PicoPSUs, but that depends on which case I get as they usually already got some PSU.

The case question remains open - I tend to get something like the LC-1350MI-V2 as it’s cheap, contains a 72W PSU and fits into the 10" rack nicely. In that case, I would need to go out of the case with the SATA cables and rack the JBOD on it’s own - which is fine since there’s pritable files for exactly that. Other possibility would be to get a case with bays for the 2,5" (seems unnecessary since I already have the JBOD and don’t want to add more requirements to the PSU) or get a case with a 5,25" bay (rare in cases this size).

I’m mostly asking for advice regarding the case/PSU thing but nothing is set in stone other than the SSD/JBOD combo. I’d like to keep the rest < 150€ and prefer used hardware, at least for the case. I’d be glad for your thoughts and ideas!