F4-424 Pro

I went the pre-built route. Terramaster F4 424 Pro on a black Friday sale. I didn't like the idea of dealing with a usb das on top of a mini PC. I saw too many warnings around usb reliability to want to deal with that. If you do go the mini PC route then don't cheap out on the USB DAS. For backups I

Have you looked at TerraMaster F4-424 (PRO)? You can simply replace the internal boot USB and use your own OS

4th option. Get a moderately powerful NAS and skip the NUC and storage issues. 4 Bay NAS from someone like Terramaster or UGreen that comes with a modern Intel chip and the ability to run the OS of your choice. Edit: For reference I'm rocking a Terramaster F4 424 Pro

My Terramaster F4 424 Pro has an Intel N305, 32Gb Memory, 4 HDD bays, 2 Nvme slots and dual 2.5gb Ethernet. It's compact and reasonably quiet. Supports running your own OS so I'm using Open Media Vault. Generally get decent discounts at common sales season e.g. black Friday.

I run Jellyfin on my Terramaster NAS with OMV as the OS. I bought the NAS during last years Black Friday sale. I have the F4 424 Pro but non Pro in either 2 or 4 bay versions would also work fine. Anything with a modern Intel CPU is pretty decent as the iGPU is very capable for any transcoding needs

I run PBS as a VM inside Proxmox running on a Terramaster F4-424 Pro. It's not ideal, and I do plan to move it to its own hardware as funds become available, but its better than nothing. I have a pair of M2 SSDs RAID1Z for boot and VM images which is where the root disk for the PBS VM lives. Then, m

Ended up getting the Terramaster F4-424 Pro as it seems like it can easily handle what I want to do with it and more for really cheap (found it for cheap compared to other things like it), and it came early!will be setting up tomorrow. super compact which is perfect for me as i have very little spac

So I took a quick look at the TerraMaster range. The F2-424 & F4-424 use the N95, the F4-424 Pro is an N305 and the F4-424 Max is using an i5-1235U. The Qnap TS-264 and 464 are using the older N5095. The TS-253E & 453E are also on the older J6412. Looks like Qnap are haven't done a hardware update f

You're obviously still somewhat constrained with a pre-built as aside from replacing the HDDs/SDDs you can't improve the hardware. So if in future you get a more CPU intensive workload the N100 type CPU is going to feel like a real bottleneck. Obviously you can always add a dedicated new system in f

No direct experience with that specific unit, but I'm very happy with my Terramaster F4 424 Pro. I didn't even boot into the OS and immediately installed Unraid. It's humming along, and as far as I can tell, isn't phoning home to any Chinese spies!