BombOmOm
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For running an OS off a USB drive, I would recommend getting a USB to M.2 enclosure and putting an M.2 drive in it. This will give you better performance than any flash drive out there. The memory they put into normal flash drives is just slow slow slow for the use case of an OS.
Now, the only negative there is that is kinda expensive. If you really want to stick to a normal USB drive, maybe try this one out. But I would really like to stress that running an OS off a normal USB drive is going to be slow.
I personally use an old self-built desktop running linux (TrueNAS and Windows also work). Getting a case with lots of drive bays is inexpensive. And it lets you do pretty much whatever you want with the NAS as it’s a full blown computer. I always found the prices for the purpose built NAS to be shockingly high.
Thisin! Links to a few min overview of a Ryzen based PoE mini-pc.
https://lemmy.world/comment/7886685
Level1Techs just posted this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW4WyuGKsho
Your basic components will be an old desktop you have lying around and two hard drives. Put the two hard drives in RAID 1 (mirroring) set with either a network share and/or FTP access to add/remove stuff from the array. The drives optimally should be the same size, but if they aren’t that is OK, the amount of redundant space available will the the size of the smaller of the two drives.
Depending on what you have lying around this might not cost you anything. However, if you are going to spend money anywhere it should be on the drives themselves. You probably don’t need anything fancy, just a pair of 5400RPM HDDs that are large enough to hold your data, plus some room to grow.
You can use any OS of your choosing as basically everything supports the requirements. Linux, Windows, and TrueNAS come to mind as viable options. You may or may not want a third, tiny, drive just to boot the OS, particularly for Windows, as it can make things easier. I personally use Linux for my basic NAS with SFTP access.
I suppose if you want to tinker with the device remotely the cloud feature might be useful. However, I know I have personally never felt the need to tinker with a UPS. They are a set-it-and-forget-it appliance.
I just put a physical label on each one listing when the battery was last replaced, so I know when it is time to replace with a fresh one.
Edit: Nor do I trust them to keep up to date with security patches for an IoT UPS. Remember, the S in IoT stands for security. Don’t add any IoT devices to your network you don’t need to.
That system is plenty capable, in fact you could drop out the GPU if you don’t have anything that will specifically be using it. It’s just going to draw power when all you need is a video-out port. The qty of RAM is particularly good, will provide plenty of cache for the array and the CPU is strong enough you could enable full-drive encryption and not have it be a bottleneck (assuming that is something you want).
TrueNAS’ boot drive doesn’t need much space or speed, might as well boot from the 250GB SSD and save the NVME SSD for w/e else you want.
For array-type, a RAID 5 (or ZFS equivalent) is going to be your best setup. Will use one drive as parity and the other three for storage. A single drive failure is allowed with no data loss.
Pentium D processors are pretty power hungry, so factor that into your thoughts. Also make sure you put a modern OS on it that is getting security updates. It probably has Win XP or Vista installed which isn’t safe to connect to any network.
It should work fine as a router as long as you don’t enable any of the packet inspection features. For basic routing and firewalling for a home network it should be plenty powerful. I would personally put a small SATA SSD in it as the main drive and ditch the 90GB HDD.
As an additional idea, if you put a larger SATA drive or two into it you could make it a NAS.