Mullvad doesn’t offer port forwarding anymore if that’s important to you.

Doesn’t bother me much since I’m only using it for media.

I bought wd red pros since people said they were quiet. I think they were comparing them to these type of enterprise drives because they are absolutely not quiet when seeking. I wouldn’t mind drives like this if they were in a closet or away from me but my nas is in my office/guest bedroom. I’ve since replaced the pros with red plus and they are MUCH quieter.

You need to edit your configuration.yaml file to exclude certain sensors or values. I excluded some of the more chatty sensors that I didn’t need and my disk use went from around 40gb to 150mb

Muh freedom

Just built one myself. Here's what I used:

• Jonesbo N2 case
• Topton/CWWK/BKHD NAS motherboard from AliExpress - includes N5105 or J6412 processors, 2 M.2 slots and 2x ddr4 slots. They haven't started rolling out N100 boards yet otherwise I would have gone for that.
• 32gb ddr4
• EVGA supernova 450gm power supply. Overkill but they don't make many sfx power supplies that are fully modular.
• 2x1tb nvme drives
• Case has 5 hdd bays for a pretty decent amount of media storage.

Cost me less than $600 USD not including any HDD. Modifying this a little could probably put you under $500

Prior to this I used an old Optiplex 3040 sff ($100) with a 1tb HDD and core i3 6100 and replaced the cd drive with a SSD bay so I could boot the OS off of that. It worked for a budget but didn't have any expandable storage.