The home NAS case market is so frustrating. For my next build, I'm going to design a 3D printed interface to use an 8-bay supermicro backplane like the BPN-SAS-747TQ, build a simple aluminum box around it with 2x120mm fans in the rear, and just run SATA and power to a PC case sitting next to it. It would even be straightforward to have activity lights and everything. Good drive temps, low noise, cheap and replaceable backplane, cheap enclosure, and full freedom of PC case choice to optimize for size or cooling or whatever. Sure, it'll be a bit bulky and a bit ugly, but I'd much rather take those downsides over noise, cost, or heat.
I 3D printed a custom PC case:
https://www.printables.com/model/486506-3d-print-pc
I can totally understand your frustration! I wish there was a product available that could do everything I want, but there isn't, and I have access to a 3D printer through my local makerspace. I will say that there are a bunch of ways to get prints made and shipped to you if you don't have access to one. I also think that lots of people 3D print things when they don't need to. When I make the enclosure that I mentioned, only the bare minimum will be 3D printed, and the rest of the enclosure will use off-the-shelf parts, a readily available backplane, and will be able to be built with simple tools.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
sff PC cooled with 3D printed ducts
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I'm not opposed to standard mid or full towers for a home NAS, but the common ones have so few 3.5" bays.
Spending 3000$ to assemble a PC and installing TrueNas as is not new nor informative to me. I'm not a huge fan of rich people spending thousand of dollars building a power hog a call it a nice NAS.
The post would be more interesting if, at least, it would show the assembling (not stolen photos) and the software settings. For a really interesting post I would like to see a before/after benchmark of performance and power consumption.
I don't think any server, especially self hosting should be CISC based like x86 architecture but RISC like arm or RiSC-V. The power usage is a order of magnitude less. Also really building yourself would probably cost hundreds and not thousands of dollars.
