These and most other NAS always seem to be such a rip-off. You can get a whole laptop with superior internals for less, and the laptop comes with expensive parts like screens, batteries, SSDs.
Consumer NAS without drives really shouldn't cost more than $50 a bay at most.
^ When they charge a lot more for more bays, I agree, but at this price point not so much.
A laptop has a shorter lifespan, might be dead in 3 years of running 24/7, and the performance difference is meaningless, even my (now retired) Celeron 500MHz fileserver could keep up with GbE for a small # of concurrent accesses, was held up by the PCI bus more than anything.
Per bay doesn't make sense to be because it only costs a couple dollars to put another SATA port on and make the PSU capable of an amp more current, then maybe $5 worth of additional metal case and sled for each drive so supporting ONE HDD might cost $100 but supporting 4 would be more like $130 BOM. Instead they are pricing relative to perceived value.
Regardless, if you have the space to do it, you can just repurpose a desktop system, especially if it's new enough to have GbE and enough SATA ports so you don't have to add cards to it, but I would get a new PSU for another tour of duty.
If nothing else the fan in a old PSU may be wearing out by now and if it has a 120mm fan, it is probably the only fan the system will need, as long as the front intake flows through the drive bays.
Technically you also need an OS. You can use windows, or Linux, or whatever, but there is a cost in either the license or time setting it up.
However, keep in mind the power consumption. Suppose whatever you throw together, uses a mere 25W more than a purpose built NAS. That's roughly $25 per year addt'l on the power bill.
My Celeron 500MHz box ran for a decade so that's potentially a $250 difference right there. When I replaced the Celeron 500MHz, I put in a Celeron J1900 board and it saved about 20W. J1900 doesn't even need a fan on its heatsink at full load, let alone a low NAS load.
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Consumer NAS without drives really shouldn't cost more than $50 a bay at most.
A laptop has a shorter lifespan, might be dead in 3 years of running 24/7, and the performance difference is meaningless, even my (now retired) Celeron 500MHz fileserver could keep up with GbE for a small # of concurrent accesses, was held up by the PCI bus more than anything.
Per bay doesn't make sense to be because it only costs a couple dollars to put another SATA port on and make the PSU capable of an amp more current, then maybe $5 worth of additional metal case and sled for each drive so supporting ONE HDD might cost $100 but supporting 4 would be more like $130 BOM. Instead they are pricing relative to perceived value.
Regardless, if you have the space to do it, you can just repurpose a desktop system, especially if it's new enough to have GbE and enough SATA ports so you don't have to add cards to it, but I would get a new PSU for another tour of duty.
If nothing else the fan in a old PSU may be wearing out by now and if it has a 120mm fan, it is probably the only fan the system will need, as long as the front intake flows through the drive bays.
Technically you also need an OS. You can use windows, or Linux, or whatever, but there is a cost in either the license or time setting it up.
However, keep in mind the power consumption. Suppose whatever you throw together, uses a mere 25W more than a purpose built NAS. That's roughly $25 per year addt'l on the power bill.
My Celeron 500MHz box ran for a decade so that's potentially a $250 difference right there. When I replaced the Celeron 500MHz, I put in a Celeron J1900 board and it saved about 20W. J1900 doesn't even need a fan on its heatsink at full load, let alone a low NAS load.
Thank you!