I had the same sticker shock on Synology drives. bought a mini computer (Intel i7) off marketplace for 70$ and some extra memory. Booted up Proxmox with different VMs but will opt for TrueNAS for scalablity in the future. Can use scale to use old laptops which are laying around to act has agents to run my vms.
In hindsight, for 100-125$, you may get some old servers or supermicro PCs to run your VMs and NAS on. Which is also a good option..
Any idea where I can find supermicros in that price range?
Honestly, it depends on where you live. In toronto, there are occasional local ads on kijiji or fb marketplace which list it for that price.
Just buy a used computer off craigslist, a sata expander if needed, a boot drive and install TrueNAS. Can be as much as 600 or as little as 200.
Do you care about power consumption?
If not, grab a used Xeon workstation off eBay or Facebook. Grab a pci HBA card and you are set. Note that TrueNas needs lots of ram.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to pay power for an empty drive, so I’d setup the 3 12x drives in a zfs pool and store/sell the 16g drives until you actually need them.
Any reason to use the three 12 Tb vs the four 16 Tb?
How much ram is recommended? 32 gb of DDR4 "enough"?
Thanks for the response!
8gb is bare minimum for ZFS. 32gb would be great. ZFS will use all of it.
I would use a minimum of 3 drives because then it is easy to expand later (opposed to starting with 1 or 2).
You could start with the 16tb drives if you want. Personally I like to save power and every spinning drive takes 5-15 watts of power.
Somewhat of a misnomer. Yes, ZFS likes RAM, and yes it’ll use a lot if you let it. So the moar the better, obviously. But to suggest anything under 8GB is unworkable is a bit in the dramatic side. You may not get optimal performance in all cases but the system will function well enough to saturate a Gbps LAN and honestly if your budget is $600 with some found rust I doubt OP’s requirements are to stream several full bitrate 4K videos simultaneously.
You could get a decent Dell R730 for under $600. Big rack mount server, but they are a great deal if you have room for them.