Home NAS with SAS Drives

[MouthBoy]

Hi All,

I have looked at other home NAS threads but cannot see anyone with this exact question. I have been given 6 x 6TB SAS drives, some that have only had a few hours of use, and I want to plop them into a PC/Server just to use as a NAS. I am unsure on a few things however.

I am conflicted between getting some older PC hardware and putting in the SAS drives by way of PCI slot cards, or getting an older server hardware and doing something similar. I will put in an SSD as a boot.

So, I have the drives, but I am unsure on the rest. Budget is genuinely as cheap as possible to make this happen. Restrictions are that it cannot be overly big or obtrusive and nothing that, at least when powered on and running, will be too noisy. It will be connected to Ethernet so no Wifi requirements. I am no good with servers stuff so really leaning on advice here. Regarding the OS, I am open to options here too.

Any advice is great.

 

[MouthBoy]

Any direction on models? I've been looking and some seem "ok" on spec but just have 2 or 3 HDD spaces, and others just seem ridiculously huge for what they properly will deliver.

Is an option just to find pc parts from a few generations ago and stick in a SAS card? Would this cause issues not running things like ECC memory or is that just not a worry?

 

[MouthBoy]

ST6000NM0034 are the models. They were free and I plan to have 4 in use with 2 redundancy, I think.

So, just get/build a low power PC, 2 of those cards and a case to house? Do I need to consider anything regarding the hardware for SAS or the NAS OS?