I had a Qnap NAS for about 6 year connect to a HTPC in the living room.
I having no NAS any more, I switched the concept to:
https://www.computeraudiophile.com/ca/ca-academy/computer-audiophile-pocket-server-c-a-p-s-v4-cortes/connected to a media render in the living room and a PC in my home office using Win Remote Desktop and iKVM for remote server management.
I run my server now since ~1 year 24 x 7 without any unplanned outage and no problems. Server is: Lian Li PC-Q25B; Corsair SF450 Gold; 2 x 8GB Kingston DDR2400 ECC RAM; Asus P10S-I; i3-7100 3MB 3.9 GHz; 64 GB Transcend MTS400 M.2 SSD; NH-9Li; NH-S12A PWM; NH-A14 PWM; 2 x 8TB WD Red + 3 x 10 TB WD Red; iKVM IPMI-Remote Management; Windows 10 Pro; JRiver Media Center; EaseUS Backup; WD Utilities;
If you have <10 TB of data a NUC or HTPC with direct attached 10 TB disk or less is easier and cheaper (if you have some enclosed space to put the disk in would be beneficial- in an open space you hear them!.)
I have the following concept for my data:
- I do not transcode much, the i3 was sufficient. If you do it a lot of transcoding a Xeon 4C is better (if ECC Ram is a requirement - if not i5, i7)
- All critical data are on two 8 TB disks mirrored by Win10 Pro Storage spaces and backuped to a local attached USB disk.
- All ripped DVD, BD are on single 10 TB disks. Because DVD and BD are static content I backup them only once on old disks and put the disks in a different location.
- If you want to change meta dat on a global level or analyze audio for a huge volume the server is pretty fast because data must not received anymore over the network
- My Media renderer has NVIDIA GTX and had Asus SFX SC -> leading to several major outages this year (That's why I prefer to have a server with MC and the data without any Audio or Graphics interface and put the latter to a separate media renderer)
- I personally would not recommend RAID5 for home use. I have had RAID 5 in the beginning on my QNAP NAS and the RAID array crashed and could not be recovered.