SerpApi.Org
When I first started my home server, I initially reached for what felt like the responsible option: a four-bay NAS. It looked like the perfect choice, as it was something purpose-built with polished software, and four bays seemed like plenty of space. If I filled two of them with mirrored drives of high enough capacity, I'd be set for years. After I bought one and went through the initial setup, though, I realized that I was asking far more of what this box was capable of, and a repurposed desktop was a much more reasonable starting point.
The four-bay ceiling arrives quick
I hit it before I started storing anything substantial
Four bays sounds pretty generous until you've filled them, though, that's not the wall I hit initially. Once you do fill them, expansion looks like an external enclosure hanging off via an eSATA port, or just the purchase of an entirely new enclosure. Network headroom is its own ceiling, and it's got nothing to do with the drive shelf. Getting speeds faster than gigabit means buying a unit that either ships with multi-gig or has a spare PCIe slot for a 10 GbE card, and not every four-bay gives you that. Synology's newest 4-bay, the DS925+, actually dropped the 10 GbE upgrade slot its predecessor had.
The nice thing about starting with a standard ATX PC as a base is the expansion. You're usually just one PCIe device away from the next big upgrade, whether that's 10 GbE networking or adding the capacity for an additional 8 drives with another HBA card. This wasn't the primary catalyst for why I switched almost immediately, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
You're at the whim of the software
If you buy a specific kind of four-bay, you're putting trust in the manufacturer
The software on something like the Synology box I bought is genuinely great for someone who wants something plug-and-play, but it can become an obstacle really fast. DSM is polished because it's a closed, curated environment that you operate in but don't really own, which has its pros and cons, but the clearest con was made obvious in 2025, when Synology moved to restrict its Plus-series models to its own certified drives. The backlash was loud enough that the company reversed course that October, and third-party drives work fine again today.
Synology would be bold to try a sweeping change of that magnitude again, and while you can easily use your third-party drives today, there's no guarantee that the firmware doesn't shift in a different unsavory way in the future. A generic x86 box running TrueNAS or Proxmox simply never puts you in a position where someone else's business decision changes what your hardware is allowed to do.
Fine for files, but friction adds everywhere else
I wanted more than a pure filing cabinet
My specific hard-ceiling ended up being performance-based. The Intel-based 4-bays like the DS423+ have Quick Sync and will hardware-transcode in Plex and Jellyfin without complaint. The AMD model like I had (and the one most people land on) uses a dual-core Ryzen embedded part with no integrated graphics, so transcoding falls back to direct play.
Transcoding is one thing, but the bigger problems I had were with everything else. These low-power embedded chips were specced to serve files, and the difference between doing that and hosting containers and VMs is large. A repurposed desktop CPU, even one that is many generations old, will have the core count and headroom to make a real difference in performance.
The humble four-bay NAS isn't a bad product
It just wasn't for me
The four-bay I ended up going with was only a bad buy for me because I asked way more of it than I should've. Idle power is one way my towering home lab loses out to a small NAS box. A four-bay NAS sips somewhere in the teens-to-thirties of watts, while a repurposed tower can idle north of fifty and climb past a hundred with drives spinning. On a machine that runs 24/7, that difference compounds pretty quickly, and the power bill might not be unaffordable with that rate of increase, it's certainly enough to be noteworthy. The unit is also small, quiet, and content to disappear on a shelf, which is one thing I did like about it.
The desktop still wins for me because of the pure performance and expansion opportunities. The moment I set it up, I only had a CPU, GPU, and 16 GB of DDR4 to work with, but I had room to add an HBA card that supports 8 drives on its own, not to mention the other handful of PCIe slots that are available for multi-gig or other expansion. I'll eat the physical space and power costs for that.
Here's what I'd actually build
You probably already have the foundation lying around
Rather than make a huge shopping list, start with what you already have, or what you can acquire cheaply. A desktop that you've retired is primed for home lab use. Put some storage in it, expand it with an HBA flashed to IT mode, and load your OS of choice: TrueNAS if you want a storage-first appliance experience you still control, or a hypervisor like Proxmox with ZFS if you want room to run virtual machines and containers from day one.
Which one is right for you depends on what you want out of a home server
Buying a four-bay NAS can be an excellent choice if it's just another node as part of a greater home lab, or if you're planning on running nothing but light, rudimentary services on it. For me, I wanted a true home lab that would give me the expandability and performance I wanted, and the small box was never going to provide that.
