Seeking Your Advice on Improving My NAS and Office Setup

[Enquiries]

Dear Robbie,
I’ve been a long-time subscriber to your channel and always find your builds and reviews both compelling and incredibly helpful. I’m reaching out for a bit of advice if you don’t mind.
I’m a British expat currently living and working in Vietnam, where I run a small business operating between the UK and Vietnam, specialising in fresh produce consultancy. While our data storage requirements aren’t huge, we do need a reliable and secure setup—especially with Vietnam’s e-invoicing requirements and compliance obligations.
To cut a long story short, I’ve built a relatively simple setup so far (which might give you a bit of a chuckle), but I’m now looking to consolidate and improve it. I’m particularly interested in building a dedicated DIY NAS using True NAS SCALE (Community Edition).
Here’s my current setup:
1. Two Office PCs – Both are ASRock Mini PCs using AMD Ryzen 5 5600G, each with:
o 64GB RAM
o 1TB NVMe (OS)
o 2TB NVMe
o 2x 1TB SATA SSD
(Yes, it’s a bit overkill for direc

[ed]

Looking at your system, you’ve clearly put performance first, and it shows. Dual ASRock Mini PCs with Ryzen 5600G and that much SSD storage gives you a lot of horsepower, even if you’re not taxing it yet. Given your goals — consolidating storage, ensuring compliance with local invoicing rules, and improving reliability — a dedicated TrueNAS SCALE box is a solid next step.

A few thoughts as you move forward:

1. DIY NAS with TrueNAS SCALE

TrueNAS SCALE (Community Edition) is a great choice, especially if you want ZFS protection, snapshots, and some flexibility for Docker/VMs in the future. Since your current PCs are already so powerful, you can offload all storage tasks to the NAS and let those Mini PCs handle invoicing, editing, and office tasks without clutter.

Given your storage target of ~10TB, I’d suggest a 4-bay or 6-bay setup with at least RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2 for peace of mind. If you’re buying new drives, go with WD Red Plus, Seagate IronWolf, or Toshiba N300 — all solid for small office NAS use.

2. Suggested NAS Hardware Build
• CPU: Intel 12th/13th Gen (i3/i5) or older Xeon-D (low power, ECC capable)
• RAM: 32GB ECC (if possible), especially with ZFS
• Drives: 4–6 x 4TB–6TB NAS HDDs in RAIDZ2
• Boot: Small SSD or mirrored 120GB SATA SSDs
• Chassis: Fractal Node 304 or SilverStone CS381 (small but expandable)
• Motherboard: Supermicro or ASRock Rack (if ECC is a priority)

This should fit well within your ~£2000 budget and give you excellent long-term reliability. If you’d like to explore something more compact or low-power (even ARM or CWWK-based), that’s an option too — but for TrueNAS, x86 is ideal.