A note on the fans specifically, you can buy quiet fans. In general, the larger the fan, the lower the speed and the quieter it is. You can also setup fan curves so they are only doing anything of note when the computer is pumping out heat (given your statements, that would be basically never).
The electricity usage is a pretty notable thing. Though, if you take the graphics card out of a desktop (use integrated graphics, a dedicated graphics card in a server is just wasted electricity) and set the OS to power saver (this mostly means it won’t boost the CPU to higher clocks), it really won’t use much power. Compared to buying dedicated NAS hardware, you may never recoup the energy costs between the hardware you have and the lower-power hardware you need to buy.
mbirth@lemmy.ml 19 hours ago
There are some passively cooled (i.e. no spinning fan) SFF Desktops (HP, DELL, etc.) or you could get a Raspberry Pi 5 and stick it into a Geekworm case. Power consumption with these devices should hover around 5W, maybe slightly higher under load. The Desktops most probably support WoL. The Raspberry Pi doesn’t.
Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
Also in my experience the raspberry pi isn’t all that great for a NAS considering you are reliant on using USB hard drives and also need a separate powered USB hub for them
mbirth@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
Which Pi did you try? Since the Pi4/CM4 (can even work with SAS drives) and especially with the Pi5 you can build some nicely performing NASes.
Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
I think I used a Pi 4B, either the 8 or 2 GiB model