01-04-2026, 02:59 PM
Thanks for the message. Based on what you want to do, a prebuilt NAS will not give you the flexibility you need. For your budget and use case, the best option is a small DIY hybrid box built around a used workstation or microserver. This gives you proper PCIe lanes for a 10G NIC or NVMe expansion, plus SATA ports for large capacity drives.
A very good fit in your price range is a used Dell T40 or an OptiPlex 7080 tower. Both give you a full PCIe slot, multiple SATA ports, and room for several drives. You can run TrueNAS Scale or UnRAID, use NVMe for apps or fast workspace, and keep a large HDD pool for your LLM library and personal data. Add a cheap 10G card and it will talk to your main system at the speeds you want.
This will feel much more robust than anything like a Zima2, and you can expand storage easily later. It also integrates well alongside your Epyc system for keeping models, embeddings, and datasets in one place.
A very good fit in your price range is a used Dell T40 or an OptiPlex 7080 tower. Both give you a full PCIe slot, multiple SATA ports, and room for several drives. You can run TrueNAS Scale or UnRAID, use NVMe for apps or fast workspace, and keep a large HDD pool for your LLM library and personal data. Add a cheap 10G card and it will talk to your main system at the speeds you want.
This will feel much more robust than anything like a Zima2, and you can expand storage easily later. It also integrates well alongside your Epyc system for keeping models, embeddings, and datasets in one place.