Home Use NAS - Will This PC Be Enough?

Lcamanch on 24/05/2026 - 10:30
Last edited 24/05/2026 - 10:30

Kia Ora,

Got this desktop PC on sale for 199$ from PB Tech (might be still on sale) and have around a week to decide, whether it's a good choice or not, untill it's delivered to local PB.
Could you please advise, will it be enough for usage as: NAS (file storage), Plex (light, 1 device streaming), Home Assistant and Pi-Hole? Given the pretty old hardware: Intel Core i5 7th Gen.
Been monitoring FB Marketplace for a while, usually for 200 you will be getting pretty similar config setup, but at least this one will be coming with limited warranty. Or am I missing something and I can get better deal from 2nd hand?

Not worried about RAM or drives, as it seems to be upgradable parts.

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  • Jexla on 25/05/2026 - 08:59
    +4

    I'll send you a Dell equivalent for free if you flick me a PM.

    Will be the same CPU generation and form factor. I'll do what I can to load it up with RAM too.

    There will be LOTS of 7th gen hardware around due to it not being officially supported by Windows 11, I wouldn't suggest anyone pay near $200 for it.

  • boldbilly on 25/05/2026 - 08:01
    +1

    I'm no expert, but I think you'll be fine for that money.

    You're not going to have much room for disks inside that sff case, so your might end up with a pile of slow external drives stuck into usb ports (like mine)

    Home assistant and pihole generally need almost nothing, so they're no problem.

    My services run on a couple of raspberry pis, an old laptop for emby, a similar desktop to yours for frigate, piles of usb drives, and multiple backups. Cheap, but not pretty.

  • DeeCee on 25/05/2026 - 11:59

    SFF may have room for 2x HDD with modification to the drive tray, but typically it is 1x HDD OR 1x Sata SSD and 2x NVME.
    You could run 2x HDD drives and run in Raid 1 to mirror the primary HDD so you have failover, or backup to that drive or an external brick.

    From a functionality perspective, it will more than fit the bill running Plex, Home Assistant etc. As the CPU has integrated GPU, then transcoding is available for Plex / media server.

    If you can find a mini-tower which has room for 4 drives, then you've got more options as a file share, redundancy, NAS software options etc.

    I've run a separate Windows PC for years as a file share, backup and Plex server. Very handy to be able to run Windows applications on a secondary PC and not tie up the primary if you are running jobs.
    My boxes used to run 8x HDD using a HP Raid controller + a Win OS SSD until I switch to Synology - which has not been as functionally useful, but I don't do home automation or need to have a home lab.

  • Alan6984 on 25/05/2026 - 14:37

    I had a good few machines of similar specs (from a client that just wanted them out of the way) that I gave away to a couple of charities a few months ago (I wiped and installed Ubuntu 24.04LTS for them - they only needed browser and maybe email), so in general, I would say $200 is quite a bit to pay for that machine, but I haven't been watching TM (say) so I don't know what is available there.

    Unfortunately, my 'supply' has now dried up (client gone), and I seriously regret not keeping hold of a couple of those machines myself as I now want to play around with installing local LLMs, and I don't have anything spare to dedicate to it, especially not with more than 8GB of RAM.

    No good deed goes unpunished I guess :-(

    • Jexla on 25/05/2026 - 15:16
      +2

      I got you, how many do you want?

      • ace310 on 25/05/2026 - 15:30

        Hey, I would like to be considered if you have extras. What specs and for how much are you selling it for?

      • Alan6984 on 25/05/2026 - 15:32

        Seriously? I only need one machine, but I'm hoping to get as much memory into it as possible - 16GB would be good, as I want to play around with installing local LLMs.

        I'm currently thinking LM Studio (since I don't know much at this point) or maybe Ollama, with something like Qwen3 / CrewAI, but I don't even know enough to be able to justify any particular options at this point.

        • ace310 on 25/05/2026 - 15:36
          +1

          For AI you would need vram(graphics card), normal ram won't suffice to run local llms.

          • Jizah on 25/05/2026 - 15:39
            +2

            @ace310: Yup I am playing around with it now in Home Assistant on an albeit older xeon server with 40gb ram. I asked it if my light was on, and it maxed out the cpu for 3 minutes before it told me it didnt know. I only have one light.

            It did tell me the time in about 2 mins though.

            • ace310 on 25/05/2026 - 15:41
              +1

              @Jizah: Yup. I literally tried both in proxmox & HA and gave up. Currently, I don't have any graphics card to run AI. Thinking of getting one to play around a bit. But for the price right now, I don't have a budget as of now.

            • Jexla on 25/05/2026 - 15:47
              +1

              @Jizah: You always crack me up Jizah haha

            • ABCDEFG on 25/05/2026 - 20:17

              @Jizah:

              I asked it if my light was on, and it maxed out the cpu for 3 minutes before it told me it didnt know. I only have one light.

              Thanks @Jizah, my laughter woke up the baby and now I'm getting divorced.

          • Alan6984 on 25/05/2026 - 15:47

            @ace310: Could I 'virtualise' (double virtualise!) the VRAM by allocating it from onboard graphics / memory?

            • ace310 on 25/05/2026 - 15:48

              @Alan6984: I doubt it, but I haven't tried or seen anyone mentioned that. But do your research.

              • Alan6984 on 25/05/2026 - 15:49

                @ace310:

                do your research.

                Yep - Already doing lots of reading currently!

        • Jexla on 25/05/2026 - 15:48

          Yeah, flick me a PM, I'm sure I can rob the RAM out of another one to get it to 4x4GB.
          It might be dusty as heck inside as it's been in an industrial setting lol.

          • Alan6984 on 25/05/2026 - 15:50

            @Jexla:

            Yeah, flick me a PM, I'm sure I can rob the RAM out of another one to get it to 4x4GB.
            It might be dusty as heck inside as it's been in an industrial setting lol.

            Will do - thanks!

            I can clean it up no problem - plenty of 'farts in a can' around here :-)

  • Everettpsycho on 25/05/2026 - 19:48

    Hardware is fine but if you want a nas with storage physical space will be your limitation on this thing, you'll likely have 1 spare m.2 and a sata port with room for 1 3.5 incj. Or 2 2.5 inch drives. I have a couple of 8th gen ones and was going to gut one in to a better motherboard to upgrade my ancient 3rd gen PC. Also sporting a 7th gen i5 running hex os (truenas) which works fine.

    One thing I have been tossing up but not found the time to look at is 3D printing a riser with drive caddies down the front to essentially lift up the side panel of one of these boxes just enough to accommodate some hard drives. There's an abundance of them and they are perfectly good boxes for this sort of use if dell hadn't gone totally proprietary on motherboard and power supply connections.

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