So when my company was upgrading their servers i inherited one, and used it as an unraid box.  A dell with 2 first gen lga 2011 xeons, 64 gig ram, and 8 3.5" hot swap trays.  And loaded it up with a bunch of 3tb refurbished reds.  The thing sounds like a low hair drier even when tamed, so it lives in the garage.

 

Years later ( was unraid 5)  Things have changed.  I only seem to use 7-8 TB, i dont host vm's, and just run a few dockers.  My backup (repeat after me, raid is not a backup) is just robo copying the array to another set of 3-6 tb drives i keep on my desk.

 

So the wheels started turning ( and the server is getting long in the tooth) about building something that could live in the room with me.  With my usage i could maybe stop using ECC ram, and build a little 35 watt box or something.  I was also thinking of ditching the whole array, and just getting a 8-12 tb drive.  I guess my main concern is their a point in running raid 1 with unraid?  Im wondering if i can just have 1 8-12tb in the unraid box, and then back that up to the 8-12tb that is going to be sitting on my desk.  I dont think unraid can do a parity check, that checks the whole drive, if its in raid 1 or just a drive without a parity drive.

 

If you're not using the bells and whistles Unraid provides, and you're just looking for up-time resilience (RAID 1) - you're probably better off with something like the My Book Duo. If you don't need resilience, just get a My Book or similar enclosure and plug it into your router - most newer models have USB ports for sharing out drives and acting as a NAS device.

 

No sense building a machine for it, those portable drives use probably less than 10 watts idle.