basically any PC with a recent (intel 10th gen and newer quad cores) CPU will work great for any normal media server build. You will just need enough space for your disks and some room to grow, the motherboard, cpu, ram and psu.

since you already have disks with media on them moving to a dedicated NAS OS will be a bit of a pain if you want some form of data protection. I’d definitely allow in the budget for at least 2 new large disks to start with. Personally I went down the unraid path as it allowed the most flexible disk mixing and matching, I could just throw whatever HDDs I had into it and all data was parity protected. it’s not free but it makes for a good home NAS. moving existing data and re-using the disks is a pain as you need to start with enough space to dump a whole disk to, then wipe that disk then add it to the array, then repeat for all of your disks, this can take days but it works and gets your data loaded and parity protected with a minimum number of new disks required.

Freenas, now called Truenas is an excellent option but it will be less flexible in adding disks that arent the same capacity. you cant just buy one HDD and drop it in to expand in the future, you tend to need to plan it out a bit more, but it is extremely fast and very reliable. so it’s free but can cost more in the long run.

If you like to tinker you can just run something like ubuntu and set it all up from scratch, or there is one called Xpenology, which is a clone of the synology software, it is very easy to use and reasonably flexible.

You can just plug the HDDs into the motherboard if it has enough ports, but I’d recommend getting onto eBay and getting yourself a SAS HBA card and sas-sata breakouts, there are sellers that have them as combo kits just for this purpose.

My first couple of server builds used the motherboard ports and the SATA controllers died pretty quickly, then I got a LSI 9211-8i, than added a sas expander for more ports, and more recently a newer 9300-16i card that will do me forever.

If I was you I would go with a custom build. You will need a PC case, a motherboard, some ram, plug in your HDDs and SSDs, maybe throw in a Nvidia graphics card for transcoding.

On the OS side I would recommend to look into something like unraid, it would allow you to run the arrs in docker.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.

[Thread #189 for this sub, first seen 5th Oct 2023, 03:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Just built one myself. Here’s what I used:

• Jonesbo N2 case
• Topton/CWWK/BKHD NAS motherboard from AliExpress - includes N5105 or J6412 processors, 2 M.2 slots and 2x ddr4 slots. They haven’t started rolling out N100 boards yet otherwise I would have gone for that.
• 32gb ddr4
• EVGA supernova 450gm power supply. Overkill but they don’t make many sfx power supplies that are fully modular.
• 2x1tb nvme drives
• Case has 5 hdd bays for a pretty decent amount of media storage.

Cost me less than $600 USD not including any HDD. Modifying this a little could probably put you under $500

Prior to this I used an old Optiplex 3040 sff ($100) with a 1tb HDD and core i3 6100 and replaced the cd drive with a SSD bay so I could boot the OS off of that. It worked for a budget but didn’t have any expandable storage.

I just use old gaming MBO with intel G3930 and no GPU, its amazing. I use 1080p only and it can run multiple streams at once. Havent tried 4k tho. I have it in a custom built case with sata drives, running debian.

Go for 12th Gen Intel cpus. You can get a simple atx cabinet wirh good airflow and install a few fans to cool the hard drives. SSD is useful for cache and OS but that’s it, so 512GB is fine for it but you can also get 1TB for future proofing.