I bought myself the asrock N100 itx mainboard with ram and drives. Thought that it’s super simple.
I’m now fighting with issues since June. The machine is always freezing after 2 days runtime. Just recently found out that it’s probably the ram stick even though I explicitly bought a stick on the mb compatibility list. Will take probably two more weeks until I get a replacement. I couldn’t use it as NAS in the meantime since I couldn’t be sure that my data is safe.
In my case that’s ok since I’m not dependent on it. You should consider if this level of jank is ok for you.
Otherwise go for the „expensive“ 2/4 bay nas where you can just return the whole thing in case something breaks and you don’t need to find out which component is faulty. Have it running reliably otherwise, with software etc set up for you. I underestimated the time investment.
I know. If you read carefully, I mention that the benefit lies in getting one thing that you can return wholesale and where you don‘t need to debug the origin of the issue yourself.