Okay, I've got a question regarding the purchase of a NAS for a limited dedicated use as well.
The thing is that I'm planning to get a holiday house this summer, and I'd like to have a NAS there, one that I'd have an access to from my "main" residence as to send tons of content there to have all the movies, music etc I need for the holidays. Plus, since it'd be for a holiday house, we wouldn't use it as much as in my main residence, where my wife and I use it for media, for work, not to mention that my son and I both store games on that NAS as well.
The trick is that I don't want "just" a NAS. I'd like to have, if possible, this computer become the core of a domotics system that would, of course, allow me to access all of that media from all computers, TVs, phones etc that would be connected to the network, but that's not all. I'd like to be able to regulate air conditioning, electricity consumption, control the rolling blinds and the brightness of the lightning from that computer as well.
Initially, I wanted to do like everyone else and have a cheap Raspberry Pi as the core of the domotics network, but there's going to be one hell of a workload on the thing, so, on other forums, I've been recommended to ditch the Raspberry and have a bona fide computer as the "brain" of the system. Which led me to the idea of having this computer work both as the domotics network's center and as a NAS, which would make "digital logistics" easier in terms of providing movies, music, games etc to all appropriate devices in the house.
And of course, there's a little catch. I'm planning to buy
this house... in Greece. The issue is that of course, I want it to be silent, but it's a computer that will constantly be under a rather heavy workload in a warm country in summer, so it will need one hell of a powerful cooling system if I don't want it to overheat.
Is there a way to have the NAS be at the same time silent and appropriately cooled? I thought about installing a liquid cooling system on it, it's expensive, but will be worth it. In terms of location, I thought about hanging the thing from the ceiling of the kitchen, in the corner above the fridge you can see in pics 3 and 5 of the page of the house, for 2 reasons:
-Noise. It will be far enough from bedrooms etc as not to disturb people, and if someone's in the kitchen for a long time, it's going to be noisy anyways because that person will be cooking.
-Wi-Fi availability. That corner is close to the middle of the house, so that there's going to be a decent access to the NAS from every room of the house, both upstairs and downstairs.
tl;dr ambitious NAS project, both NAS and domotics in one computer, 2 questions:
-Is it possible to do that?
-Warm country. Is liquid cooling appropriate and silent enough?
Thanks!