Dipping my toes in a he Nas and trying to decide where to lean for Hardware

TrueNAS General
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Hi everyone.
I decided to play around with setting up a home nas for storage, media station and playing around with some VMs. I am not completely new to building computers and such but am definitely not an expert, and even less so when it comes to Nas
All this to say if it looks like I haven’t got clear ideas… It’s because I don’t :slight_smile:
Given the difficulty of finding used server parts where I live I was starting to build something using desktop parts and was looking at:
Case: Node 804 (sufficiently small)
Motherboard: Asus z690m d4 plus (bought)
CPU: Intel i5 12400 (bought - fairly cheap and has quicksync)
Memory: still looking but thinking around 32-64Gb of ddr4 3200
Boot Drive: Samsung 970 Evo plus 256-500gb (based on what offers I find)
Storage: building up 4-8Tb drives as I find them (currently have a few Seagate IronWolf)

As luck would have it however someone posted an add for an old setup for 350$ but if I understand little of desktop hardware I have even less knowledge of server hardware and wanted to know if I might be better off starting from the following (given I think mi should be able to sell the motherboard and CPU rather easily )

Motherboard: Supermicro X11spf-tf
CPU: Intel Xeon Gold 6122
Memory: 6x16gb DDR4 ECC ram (not better identified.

Is this a better starting point? My understanding is that specific server hardware is possible more efficient, and what caught my attention was the RAM which is probably overkill, but looks cheap(though not knowing brand or anything else it might be made out of cardboard)

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If you mean “energy-efficient,” probably not–I’d expect it to consume a good bit more power than the i5 you have. It’s going to be much more capable, and you know it supports ECC, but energy-efficiency wouldn’t be the reason to go for that system. But for that board/CPU/RAM, I’d say US$350 is quite a good price.

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Hmm for some reason I though the would have a lower idle power consumption.
Aside from the good price would it be better for me to switch over to those and sell the motherboard and CPU I already got? I realize it’s subjective decision but would their be any big advantage. ECC is interesting, but my takeaway from various threads is it’s not mandatory, and having a mATX would be nice