I would like to make myself a media server and NAS which stores my photoes and files. I have an Optiplex 3070 with a 1 TB Hdd which i plan to use for my media server and want to buy a raspberry pi to use as a NAS for photos and files. What do you think ? will raspberry pi5 be enough, i want something small.
I would install truenas scale on the optiplex and run plex or jellyfin as a app from truenas.
Adding a second large drive for redundancy would be good, also a smallish ssd for the truenas os to run from.
My personal setup takes this level deeper. I have a desktop computer running proxmox. proxmox is installed on a nvme drive. I have a VM running truenas that I have passed my sata controller to. So my 2 10TB sata drives and my 500Gb sata ssd show up as native drives in truenas. The 10tb mirror holds my media library and long term backups. The 500gb ssd is for running apps on trunas like plex, syncthing.
I have a 512 gb ssd in the optiplex and 1 tb hdd on sata. Should I upgrade the hdd to a 4 tb and use the optiplex for media server and nas? Using truenas?
I would get multiple drives and do RAID. Here’s a helpful calculator to figure out drive quantity, size, and configuration. The reason to do RAID is redundancy. Hard drives will fail (even NAS branded drives). You do not want your photos, media, etc to be lost in that case. I personally do not go with anything below RAID5 (and for super sensitive things, I’ll even go RAID6 - despite the hit on overall capacity. If the optiplex has drive capacity for multiple drives, I strongly recommend you go this route.