I was about to buy a Microserver Gen 10, which idles at 43 watts while holding 4 7200rpm HDDs, whisper silent. HP Proliant Microserver Gen10 as router or NAS
Then a friend showed me this website, and the NAS killer 4.0 / 4.1. I put the gen10 on hold, and am now wondering: do any of the sample builds get close to the efficiency and silence of the Microserver gen10? They’re certainly more powerful, which is great, but noise and efficiency come first for me.
Fans are what’s going to contribute to your sound levels. Go with a build that supports Arctic fans and you’ll be fine. Go with a low power CPU and you’ll be pretty good.
There are threads here about versions of NAS Killers that are very detailed and fit well within your budget.
That said, I am really interested in seeing how far we can take some cheap, low power devices.
Here’s where I explore this idea and would enjoy your input: Any technical reasons why we cant have a NAS Killer using the intel HP 290 or ProDesk 400 G4?
It sounds like that you are looking for something similar as I do. Have a look at this post conversation with @mgutt . He has build a NAS that is very efficient by using hardware that draws minimum power and utilizing a SSD cache that keeps the HDD raid in sleep mode for most of the day.