So, I’ve been looking into NAS for a few weeks and it dawned on me that i could just turn the computer that i have now into a NAS once i get a new computer. I’ve been seeing people doing the same idea online, but… Is it as simple as just buying a few extra hard drives and downloading TrueNas? Or is ti more complicated than that? I’m really new to this whole thing and even though I’ve been learning alot, its still confusing and i have a habit of over-complicating things lol.
Short answer: “yes with an ‘if’”. Long answer: “No with a ‘but’”.
Realistically, you should be fine to slap a few hard drives into an old pc as long as it meets minimum RAM requirements & has some half-way competent processor made in the last 15 years.
If you are more paranoid & have cash to burn, ecc ram is a plus. If you want to run apps or vms, more memory & cpu cores are a plus.
If you need more sata port, then grab an HBA; try to avoid sata cards, raid cards, usb drives, or port multipliers unless you enjoy additional headaches if anything ever goes wrong.
Only other comment is that TrueNAS requires a dedicated boot drive which some find odd - so try to get an old ssd for it when possible (size does not have to be large, 64gb is fine).
For years I went the “server grade” route .. my previous setup was an X470D4U, 5800x (not exactly server grade ..) and 4 x 16GB ECC UDIMMs .. HBA card flashed to IT-Mode .. a mix of SATA and SAS drives
I decided to rebuild my server using the AM5 platform .. and just went with all desktop grade components this time around .. cheaper for arguably better quality parts
I still use a 32GB M.2 SATA drive for booting .. I had to get an NVMe to SATA adapter though
I only run 4 x 14TB SATA HDDs now instead of the plethora of mismatched drives I ran before .. so the 4 onboard SATA ports on my B650m Pro RS are working great
I only run Plex, ADGuard Home and some SMB shares .. so plain desktop parts meet my needs just fine .. if it was affordable though, I’d rather run ECC UDIMMs for that little extra bit of safety in regards to data integrity .. my regular 2x24GB 5200 desktop RAM seems to be doing the job just fine.
I’m not a power user at all .. or expert on NASs or networking .. but my setup works and it meets my simple needs/wants