I use mine for multiple things mainly iscsi and smb but I recently spun up a jellyfin and pihole with tailscale to dabble with and am working on a home assistant setup for all my smart garbage,
my current setup is as follows;
ASUS TUF x570 plus wifi MOBO.
64gb Mushkin Redline Black ECC 3600mhz Ram
AMD 5900X CPU with Thermalright Peerless Assassin Cooler.
GTX 780TI GPU Water cooled.
Be Quiet Darkbase Pro 900 V2 Case.
Corsair 750W PSU.
Intel x540 t2 Nic with bonded connection for iscsi and smb for my main pc (this is acting like a DAS box for my games and media)
One pcie x4 to nvme expansion card,
One pcie x4 sata 3 x4 expansion card.
drives are lain out as such across 2 pools;
the first pool I call my non redunant storage where I keep stuff I dont mind losing or have backups elsewhere of its 1 wide 5 disks with 2 500gb drives 2 1tb drives and 1 usb 8tb drive and 1 l2arc sata ssd all of which are setup with ztsd 10-12 compression levels and 32kb record size for optimal compression to offset the fact these are all SMR drives for archival (I also setup a swap partition here because I was getting kernel panics due to a lack of ram when importing my redundant pool after having to repair it with ubuntu zfs)
my second pool is my redundant pool that consists of 2 wide 4 disks and a l2arc nvme gen 4 2tb cache drive with my 2 mirrored nvme gen 3 drives as slog drives and my data drives are as follows 2 10tb 2 18tb and 1 20tb and 1 22tb drives all in a mirror (yes I had to mirror the 22 and 20 despite losing a bit of storage space) with them all being CMR drives, this pool is setup with ztsd 4-7-10 depending on the dataset with 32kb record size and 3 zvols for windows iscsi with ntfs (games,apps,iscsi and media all live here and need to be fast for encoding directly off the server with handbrake for my movie collection and streaming games for steam to my pc too(iscsi))
what happens is that occasionally I have a drive drop for no discernable reason once every six months or so and after unplugging it and then rebooting and plugging it in again the drive is resilvered and reports no issues and I have a reliablilty warning on my 2 slog drives that are nvme despite no actual smart issues, the reliability issue seems to stem from just power on time for the nvme drives themselves from what I can gather
the other issue is my chassis has all the available drive bays full and I’m on a very tight budget and the chassis is in my closet and I need a DAS box that will allow me to add a couple drives as my storage quickly filled up archiving all my movies I need one that will either replace my internal sata expansion card (x4 form factor and x4 more sata 3 slots) or a decent usb enclosure (I am aware that its less than ideal to use) I heard that terramaster makes decent usb enclosures otherwise for any external DAS box with a pcie interface it would need to have at least 4 more slots for internal sata as well.
I have owned a few qnap parts and they have all not functioned correctly for me despite their good feeling build quality.
any suggestions for anything budget oriented less than 150$ or so is welcome even if its a temp fix till I can get a proper DAS solution or a rackmount head and disk shelf setup.