I remember my first own switch being a Netgear as well. It was a regular 100mbit switch, but it had the words “ProSafe” on it and was made of metal, so that felt really good… Basically it looked exactly like in your picture.

I think that was also the only piece of Netgear equipment I ever really used 😅. Did they ever change the design?

Haven’t done it myself, but I’d say the most important thing is to not short anything out. A lot of 1u cases already come with a plastic sheet on the bottom.

Maybe see if you can get some sort of stand you could tape or screw into the case and then the NUC onto that. Maybe NUC board to itx screw holes adapters exist, don’t know.

That’s where I’d start, next thing is getting the ports accessible. Most stuff is available as keystones, at least USB and such. If you can 3D print, an adapter for the io shield to hold some keystones shouldn’t be too hard to make.

Add some case fans as well and that’s about it I’d say.

For that kind of money you can get new mini PCs that will be much more powerful and have more than one NIC, like the other comment mentioned.

Take a look at Beelink mini PCs for example.

I can’t say for certain in your case, but usually hardware RAID addresses disks by port, while software RAID addresses disks by serial.

So if it’s a hardware raid I’d say it won’t work - but I may be wrong, it’s just from my experience with older raid controllers where you had to insert disks into their specific slot to not break the array.

In short: no. In longer: hell no.

Jokes aside, everything that comes with a Xeon L is ancient and will draw a lot of power for not very much performance. In fact, I think your i3 might be more powerful than those R610.

Those R620 may still be ok, but they are also getting really old now. They will be very noisy - if you haven’t run a server like those at home, you’ll be surprised how loud those are. Imagine a vacuum running constantly in your room. That noisy. You can’t do much about that, they simply need a ton of airflow, so more quiet fans would most likely lead to overheating.

For your use case I would simply go with a used desktop (not the tiny ones, a regular sized one), add a HBA for more drives and call it a day. Those are cheap, roughly 70-80€ for a used 7th gen i5. The bigger ones might even be cheaper because most people want the sff or tiny versions. A used LSI HBA with IT mode may be another 30-40€ or so. That system will sip power and most likely won’t be audible. If it is, swap in silent fans and done.

If you do want a rack mount, ipmi, and so on, I’d go the diy route with a Xeon e3 v5/6. Gen system. Those are plenty powerful and don’t draw too much power. Downside is they mostly exclusively use ECC UDIMM which is rather rare and expensive in the used market.