It's not going to make a very good NAS. It looks like it only has USB 2 and 100M ethernet. That's going to be slower than the NAS I built with the Pentium 4 desktop I got for free in 2007.
There is no need to separate compute and storage unless there's a reason for separating them. Usually that reason is redundancy and high availability, so that you can take down a compute node or storage node and still keep everything running.
I’d recommend against separating storage and compute in most small environments. Separating them means you suddenly have higher latency and less bandwidth between your data and whatever you want to do with it. Sure, there are good reasons to do it (centralizing storage for multiple nodes, for example), but go into with your eyes open to the trade-offs.
While I agree with you in principle, I separated mine because I use mini PCs for compute and there's not a lot of room for storage in any of them.
Sure. For full disclosure, I also run separate compute and storage. I do think separating storage from a compute cluster can be a good option, but not necessarily for the use case described in the original question.
While splitting Compute and Storage is nice I think the main takeaway should be having your opnsense/router on it's own physical hardware.
Having your storage separated won't stop a Jellyfin interruption if you reboot your compute.
For a NAS solution the cheap way would be a used desktop with at least 4 SATA ports, a Linux distro you're used to and Cockpit installed.
Oh I definitely want to have a dedicated machine for the opnsense, I was planning that and a small switch as a gift to myself for my birthday. I just wanted to figure out if I could do something with this poor laptop lol.
I'll keep your NAS setup in mind.
Whats your use case for the NAS? Mine is a media library and anything over USB would really suck. But I have a oldish TerraStation running a modified version of debian for my NAS. It'd probably be easiest using an old desktop and just throwing whatever debian stable is on it.
Compaq... Now that is a name I haven't heard in a loooong time
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