If you're looking for a really good alternative: Supermicro makes large chassis that will hold a fair number of drives (I have one that will take drives). They're usually sold cheap on ebay and other such sites when they're written off. If you're willing to replace a couple of fans and do your own software installation they're unbeatable for value-for-money, and they last just about forever. I've still got two Synology diskstations with 12 bays each and one extender. But the Supermicro is far more powerful and seems much more reliable and better engineered, even if it isn't as easy to set up. The downside of the Supermicro chassis is that they're not really made for residential use, they're pretty loud. But other than that redundant power, lots of CPU and RAM for caching.
How's the power consumption? Everytime I look at used server deals on ebay that seem too good to be true, the hidden cost is usually power. It's fairly normal for these systems to consume hundreds of watts idle, and $1/watt/year is a decent rule of thumb in the US (but much more in places like CA). And that’s not factoring in running the AC more if you’re in a hotter climate.
I’m looking at a NAS build myself and am leaning toward a consumer mobo and an older Intel, like maybe a 9th gen i5. 6 SATA ports is pretty standard, and three mirrored 20 TB pairs is a lot of storage for most folks. Boot drive could be a small NVME.
Depends on how you configure the whole thing. You could add another XEON and not spin down the drives and it would consume quite a bit of power, of you can put it to sleep and conserve but there is of course a spin-up price to that when you need it.
It will definitely consume a few hundred Watts, and when you pack it full of drives it will be more than that. But that's kind of logical. A Synology would not consume that much power but it would also be far slower and have less capacity.
