I’ve had my NAS/File Server up and running in its (hopefully) final configuration for a couple of months, now. It’s a DIY Windows 10 Pro box (upgraded from Windows 7 Pro), Intel DH87RL motherboard (1 mSATA and 5 SATA ports) with Core i5-4670 CPU, 32GB DDR3 DRAM and 4 Seagate 3TB NAS HDD SATA 6Gb/s 64MB (ST3000VN000) drives in a RAID 10 Array, yielding 5.5TB capacity. I’m using the Intel RAID on the motherboard to configure RAID 10 as well as the Intel Chipset SATA RAID Controller driver in Windows 10. The case has a drive dock built into the top that will accept 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA drives. The OS is on an Intel 120GB mSATA SSD, with only minimal software installed (Windows Defender and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, TeraByte’s Image For Windows). I access it through RDP, and it’s plugged into a UPS.
The RAID array has copies of my archival storage, my OneDrive folder, and duplicates of my current data from my desktop and laptop. I’m ripping my movie collection (over 50 and counting) there, and it’s also a target for drive images from my other machines (as well as other drives/locations). I intend to copy my music collection there as well. The shared folders (drive images, files, movies) are mapped as a single drive on my desktop and laptop, my network is gigabit and configured as a work network, not Home Group.
The only performance testing I’ve done is viewing the same movie with three different devices all at the same time. Smooth and flicker-free on all three. I wanted this NAS to serve for the long haul, and did a lot of reading before I started buying parts. I looked into Linux based NAS, but decided I’d rather stay with an OS with which I’m familiar. From what I’ve been able to deduce from all my reading, this setup should be pretty robust for a home server.