I thought for a moment this was in the wrong sub. At this point I think your friends mom needs some taking care of around the house.

For Plex specifically it is a pass. This will have Xeons and Xeons don’t support quick sync. You are going to be much better off buying one of those micro desktops from Dell/HP/Lenovo.

If they have DDR3 RAM, I personally wouldn’t use them Strictly for performance understandings. This being they would struggle to keep up with any more modern chip you can get that does support DDR4/DDR5 for a decent price.

That being said, if you need a server to run some basic tasks. You could do worse, but I wouldn’t say I suggest it.

If I were using that site personally and looking I would look more towards the HP DL380 G9 for about $500. But anything from that site is going to SUCK when it comes to sound. Not something you want in a room where you want it to be quiet. Mine is in my office and makes a decent but not unbearable sound.

So this is one of those “You have $5 build a XXXXX” situations. You can build a monster for the full budget and put work into it and it work forever with plenty of power. You can spend a smaller portion of the budget and it requires less setup but maybe is lighter on power. You get the idea.

My thought process here is to understand what exactly you do need. You said you like the form factor of the mini PC. But then also the DIY PC ? So what are the requirements here? The Synology would be near identical to this in form factor so I am confused.

I am going to give two types of advice. The build I went with and its cost, and the honest truth.

1. My build is an HP DL380 G9 rack mounted server. It has dual Xeon CPUs and 100+ GB of RAM. I then also have a Tesla M40 GPU in the system. All together with 2 brand new 2TB SSDs it cost me about $800. The server was about $300 on ebay shipped. The GPU was about $100 including the cable for power. The extra RAM was about $100 for 64+ GB DDR 3 ECC. The SSDs were $260. Granted, you would have to use 2.5 inch drives in this setup, it is very much a powerful machine that can handle most anything.

2. For your setup. You are the only person who can determine what is best for you. I can tell you specs, I can tell you my experience, I can tell you about features of systems and OSes. What I can’t tell you is what is going to fill your needs the most both in terms of hardware and its design in the space you have chosen.

The only piece of advice I will give you is this: If you plan on running a plex server, you will want a CPU that can use quick sync. Intel’s new ARC GPU should be able to as well if you went with a GPU option but I cannot speak to this as I have not tested.

Unraid, and TrueNAS are both solid options. You also have Proxmox you can run. It is important to understand though that Unraid and Proxmox are more than just a NAS. They also host VMs and Docker containers. You do have to pay for a license for Unraid though. It is a one time purchase.

The big thing with Unraid compared to the others is that you don’t really have to worry about the size of disks to get the protection of a parity drive. As long as your largest drive in the array is the parity drive you are good.

TrueNAS also has paid options but they do have the free version.

Proxmox is also open source. Which may be something that you like.

Personally I use Unraid. It is solid and I have had zero issues.

The Ryzen CPU is the best in terms of raw performance. Not by a ton, but it does perform better. I also don’t think those Intel CPUs support quick sync so no reason to even consider them really.

The Ryzen also boosts, while the Intel ones don’t.

It is only as risky as it is attackable.

If you use it internally and segment things so that only your server can reach it, then it is essentially impossible to attack.

Then on the other hand, is your network secure? How easy would it be to get in? Where is the weak point? You have to remember that this is a home. It is not likely to be a large target and generally as long as you have any kind of intelligence you will be fine.

So realistically, you will be fine as long as you don’t host it out to the internet in any ways.