Can you homebrew a Qnap HS-453dx?

[Quartz]

Not everyone needs zillions of terabytes. Not everyone has space for a rack. Many people like their stuff to look great - high Wife Acceptance Factor - and the Qnap does look great. Two 18 TB drives in a Qnap HS-453dx will do many people. And you can get 100 TB drives if you have the money. But it's a closed solution. What if I wanted to run Windows Server Essentials on it? Or TrueNAS? Or something else?

So, how would you do it? Mini-ITX board, obviously - unless there's a nano-ITX board with 10Gb ethernet - and the two drive bays, but what about the case? CPU? Cooling?

 

[sandys]

Any motherboard and chip will do, it all comes down to your power requirements and budget, if aesthetics is your issue find the case you want it to look like and let that define your parts, asthetics are a personal thing so can't help your but for a painless life prebuilt stuff is quite good, compact and look pretty decent.

I built mine around an asrockrack board, predominantly so I could have a 20G link to my desktop for transferring big video files back and forth via NVMe as if it was local storage, not everyone needs that and could get around with more modest setups.

I used to have an LC19 that would fit in a home entertainment setup and not look to bad, that would fit an uATX/ITX plus a couple of drives, I'm sure there are others.