So I believe the Pi 4 was the 1st to have an actual ethernet controller and not just having essentially a built in USB to ethernet adapter so bandwidth to your HDDs/ethernet shouldn’t be a problem.

Streaming directly off of the pi should be tolerable. A bit slower than a full fat computer with tons of ram for caching and CPU power to buffer things. But fine. There’s some quirks with usb connected HDDs that makes them a bit slower than they should (still in 2025 UASP isn’t a given somehow) But streaming ultimately doesn’t need that much bandwidth.

What’s going to be unbearable is transcoding. If you’re connecting some shitty ass smart TV that only understands like H264 and your videos are 265 then that has to get converted, and that SUCKS. Plex by default also likes to play videos at a lower bitrate sometimes, which means transcoding.

There’s also other weird quirks to look out for. Like someone else was (I think) doing exactly what you wanted to do, but no matter what the experience was unbearable. Apparently LVM was somehow too much compute for the pi to handle, and as soon as they switched to raw EXT4 they could stream perfectly fine. I don’t remember why this was a problem, but it’s just kind of a reminder of how weak these devices actually are compared to “full” computers.

HBAs are cheap, IPMI isn’t at all needed under normal uses cases, and ECC is way overkill.

For most people a halfway decent PC that isn’t failing is plenty.

For backups it will be fine. Same for media storage. But if you want media streaming from the device (like plex) then you’ll want something better.

The GTX 480 is efficient by modern standards. If Nvidia could make a cooler that could handle 600 watts in 2010 you can bet your sweet ass that GPU would have used a lot more power.

Well that and if 1000 watt power supplies were common back then.

Most modern boards will. Also there’s integrated graphics on basically every single current CPU. Only AMD on AM4 held out on having iGPUs for so damn long.

There was a post a while back of someone trying to eek every single watt out of their computer. Disabling XMP and running the ram at the slowest speed possible saved like 3 watts I think. An impressive savings, but at the cost of HORRIBLE CPU performance. But you do actually need at least a little bit of grunt for a nas.

At work we have some of those atom based NASes and the combination of lack of CPU, and horrendous single channel ram speeds makes them absolutely crawl. One HDD on its own performs the same as this raid 10 array.

Really?!? The company that LTT has invested in might also support some problematic people?

And when you see how bad their windows support is it’s a miracle anyone buys this garbage.

It’s a neat concept. But at the moment only Apple has pulled it off well. And that’s only if you stick with Mac OS.