Not sure how you managed to get 8TB disks in there but the following is direct from spec sheet of HP N54L
"Internal Drive Support: o 4 Internal HDD Support o Maximum internal SATA storage capacity of up to 8.0TB (4 x 2TB 3.5" SATA drives)"
You can get 8TB but not 4 lots of 8TB i.e. 32TB or any combination of raid setup
I didn't specify k cpus you would better off old gen Xeon or even pentium CPUs that are specific as servers for virtualized environment. So no need to be pedantic.
I agree with your assessment on security but a VM firewall should be as secure as a dedicated firewall that firewall will be the first port of call for any hack. So host system's security setup follows that. Its fair common practice.
On array size, it is dependant on the CPU. On qnap arm chips arent equipped with 64bit environment meaning the total raid stripe is limited to 16tb. I suspect Synology will have similar issue. Some qnap systems do have x64 CPU and the QTS system supports more than 16TB strip.
Fact checking done. Thank you.
You call that done
If by pedantic, you mean I pointed out you were wrong, shouldn't be offering incorrect advice on a platform you clearly have no direct experience with, then yea, I'll take that. Once you get over the 2TB limit then it's rare you'll encounter a hardware limit on drive size that isn't down to software, simply put HP won't devote resources to HCL'ing current gen hardware on a previous hardware generation it stopped selling two generations ago (Microservers skipped Gen9) at the time 2TB drives were about as big as it got - people have been using 3TB drives in them since 3TB drives launched, I currently have 6x2TB and 1x128GB SSD inside an N36L, according to the spec sheet that's not supported either, my N54L is running 8TB drives and yes I really do know the difference between a drive and an array.
As to the processor point, do you even English? I wasn't being pedantic, I provided a general overview of what was required and why. You didn't qualify your statement with Xeon, or for that matter 'old Xeon's' let alone Pentiums (the 4 series 46x0 are nice efficient little chips that support vt-d/x/ECC/HT and nice low TDP), if you suggest a self build, then have the sense to make sure that you qualify it with the basic requirements, which brings us on to 'old Xeon's'.
Power hungry, hot, inefficient and noisy are the terms I associate with 'old Xeon's', ex corp. pulls generally don't make for a good choice for a home user unless you're hard of hearing, need to heat a room/house, don't pay for your power or generally don't like life. 1366 or newer is about the limit, anything else in the current UK market rarely hits a low enough price point to make any real sense, even if it did they're not home friendly. LGA 2011 boards are relatively cheap, Xeon v2/3 (the latter being LGA2011-3) chips are reasonably priced and they run cooler/have much better long term prospects.
Firewall wise virtualisation is considered bad. It'll work, but it's not best practice or 'fair practice' as you state. Home users do it, production environments generally don't.
As to Synology (I did specifically qualify my statement by mentioning them), the CPU architecture isn't the reason for the array size limit they impose. It's a legacy software limit which should be removed in the next major DSM release. Qnap wise, the humble Marvel 5182 in the entry level kit is ARM 64 based, that would suggest it's instruction set is not the issue, it being prehistoric in the world of ARM is a different matter.
