Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

While it may be tempting to go "mini" and NVMe, for a normal use case I think this is hardly cost effective.

You give up so much by using an all in mini device...

No Upgrades, no ECC, harder cooling, less I/O.

I have had a Proxmox Server with a used Fujitsu D3417 and 64gb ecc for roughly 5 years now, paid 350 bucks for the whole thing and upgraded the storage once from 1tb to 2tb. It draws 12-14W in normal day use and has 10 docker containers and 1 windows VM running.

So I would prefer a mATX board with ECC, IPMI 4xNVMe and 2.5GB over these toy boxes...

However, Jeff's content is awesome like always

these little boxes are perfect for my home

My use case is a backup server for my macs and cold storage for movies.

6x2Tb drives will give me a 9Tb raid-5 for $809 ($100 each for the drives, $209 for the nas).

Very quiet so I can have it in my living room plugged into my TV. < 10W power.

I have no room for a big noisy server.

While I get your point about size, I'd not use RAID-5 for my personal homelab. I'd also say that 6x2TB drives are not the optimal solution for low power consumption. You're also missing out server quality BIOS, Design/Stability/x64 and remote management. However, not bad.

While my Server is quite big compared to a "mini" device, it's silent. No CPU Fan only 120mm case fans spinning around 500rpm, maybe 900rpm on load - hardly noticable. I've also a completely passive backup solution with a Streacom FC5, but I don't really trust it for the chipsets, so I also installed a low rpm 120mm fan.

How did you fit 6 drives in a "mini" case? Using Asus Flashstor or beelink?