I've built my home NAS years ago using a Ultron RPS19-G3380 case and a Atom D410 mainboard, system is embedded XigmaNAS (formerly NAS4Free), and I wouldn't chan

I've built my home NAS years ago using a Ultron RPS19-G3380 case and a Atom D410 mainboard, system is embedded XigmaNAS (formerly NAS4Free), and I wouldn't change it for any ready made solutions. It boots from a USB key direclty inserted on the mainboard and works flawlessly since day one. Max uptime is over 2 years, and I had to turn it off for scheduled maintenance. Other than disk and system upgrades, it doesn't need much attention from the user; mine is on a 2.5 meters high shelf and had to move it down once in years to upgrade to XigmaNAS and bigger disks. Admittedly I didn't test it for power consumption which I believe would be slightly worse than most similarly specced ARM boards, but sadly ARM support is still a work in progress so I have to stick to x86. > What are some caveats that I should avoid? Be very careful about SATA connectors: they're among the worst piece of junk ever designed and have an extremely low guaranteed life (literally dozens of operations, not thousands), therefore, don't think of drive bays and especially desktop "toasters" as something in which drives can be inserted and pulled every day; that would be a solution for defective contacts and data loss. Been there, done that. Twice. > Can I trust the 'standard' companies (Synology, QNAP, Seagate, ...) to keep my data sufficiently safe? I guess so, although sometimes there are stories about newly discovered vulnerabilities. It's also possible malicious hackers would rather direct their attack on well known products than home built systems, but that doesn't mean nobody is attempting to target our NASes. I don't have any experience with those brands, however. As for the rest, I was also following the Helios64 project which seemed really intriguing, albeit it meant moving from *BSD to Linux (actually I am a Linux user, although I like more BSD solutions for NAS servers and firewalling). Unfortunately the project died. It's FOSS, though, hardware and software so hopefully someone will take over development and production. https://kobol.io/ https://kobol.io/