Build advice for Aussies

Technology Buy Curious
1

Hey guys,

I’ve just found this site, and I love what I see and have been looking at the build guides. I’ve noticed that they’re obviously tailored towards the US or Euro market. I am in Australia, and would love to be able to have my own NAS killer build without blowing the bank trying to ship stuff here. Has any aussies done this? any recommendations on local ebay/amazon stock?

I currently have a Synology DS415+ - it’s my second one of these after the first one bricked after 4 years (was the intel atom bug, they replaced it out of warranty at least). I have always been interested in having my own unraid server, and want to go that route. My budget for this build is as much as I’d pay for a DS918+ ($750 AUD).

I do have a Dell Optiplex 9020 with i7 4970 and 16gb ram sitting around + 2 x Lian Li PC-P80 big boy cases sitting around too. I won’t need to buy any HDD’s for the NAS build, I am just looking for the parts. I’d love the possibility of 10gb networking, but I can understand if it’s out of my budget. I mainly use my NAS for storage, plus a bunch of dockers (radarr, sonarr, ombi, etc).

Any ideas? :slight_smile:

Cheers

2

If you’re not using the Dell yet, it’s more than enough for a build. Are you planning unraid or something else?

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Unraid :slight_smile:

I guess if I was going NAS with the Optiplex I’d have to pair it with a better PSU? not sure what kind is in them, and I’d have to sort out the limited sata ports on mobo.

4

then build DAS into the Lian Li cases

2 Likes
5

Never even thought about DAS. Will check that out.

6

I’m looking at the validity of using a Dell PowerEdge of some sort as these are cheaper than the equivalent hardware bought piece-by-piece.

1 Like
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Interesting. Didn’t see many budget friendly PowerEdges on ebay, what price range are we looking at?

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~250 seems to be the starting range for decent looking servers. There are instances from ~100 and up but those seem to mostly be damaged or missing panels. T110, T110 II and T310 servers pop up commonly.

FWIW, I’ve started looking at whether these are viable replacements for a DIY machine and haven’t yet come to a conclusion either way. But, it seems that you can get similar specs to some of the builds here while spending significantly less once postage and fees are taken into account.

And all that said, my preference would be to DIY it but I dislike paying postage that’s greater than or equal to the item cost.

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I know what you mean. These are interesting. They’re pretty much in the same price range as the Optiplex’s so it’s a juggle up of the xeon’s vs the i5’s, i7’s of the optiplex.