u/the_kinda_person

hello,

i am sorry if similar questions are already asked but i think it would be interesting to have a new answer especially with the hard disks and NAS prices nowadays.

i have a homelab, with an internal ssd and a really old and slow (aka dying) external hdd, and i am thinking of buying a new NAS enclosure with new hdd disks.

i want my decision to be scalable with my future needs (once the prices settle).

for the moment 4to is sufficient to me, but in regards to the enclosure i do not know what to look for, a dumb enclosure? which one ? how many bays etc.

my current budget for both the enclosure and the disk (only one at the moment, would require RAID in the future) is 250$.

what would u recommend me buying ?

thanks

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Edit: responding to comments

1. My current home server has an intel n95 cpu thats generally used under 10%, with a couple of spikes per day. I have 16gb of ram of which 6gb is used all the time, with rare spikes.
2. My target capacity in 5y (after that i dont mind buying a new nas if needed) is 20tb with replication (so 3 disks with raid 5 each having about 10tb, also i dont mind buying a smaller drive now and buying bigger ones in the future while keeping this one as an offline backup for critical data)