I’ve found an Inspiron with an FX8800P and 1 3.5” slot and a DVD slot. I intend to use it in my 3-2-1 backup with two drives (one hot, one warm) and the third backup in AWS Glacier (inb4 fuck Amazon - it’s cheap). It will also function as a NAS.
Have you placed a 3.5” drive in the 5.25” DVD bay? I understand you may need an adapter. Not sure if I can skip that.
The reason I can’t use a consumer NAS is because I want to power one of the drives off for power, longevity, and I don’t want to use RAID (also they’re quite $$$).
Edit:
Doesn’t look like a dock is necessary…
Yeah so the answer is no
Yeah… I’m not sure anymore that pre-builts are the best NAS machines. Looks like I’m buying piecemeal.
You just need to go for non small form factor machines. Anything with half height pcie cards is going to have like 1 3.5” bay max.
That said they rarely have much 3.5” space anyways so building is typically better. You can usually find a CPU mobo ram combo for cheap online. Then just pick a case and power supply and you’re good to go.