Looking for cost effective NAS for ESXi homelab and 1080p streaming

[socalTurnip]

Hello QNAP World!

I am on the hunt for a NAS 6-bay+ that I can use at home for personal data storage, some 1080p streaming (only to one device at a time) but primarily for iSCSI/NFS Vmware datastore.

I purchased a Synology DS1618+ and for the price that it cost, I didn't feel it was worth it. I wrote about it here I spent some time searching around and I considered the larger DS1819+ (8 bay) but the price that Synology charges for 2 additional bays vs the DS1618+ is ridiculous.

Anyways, I came across a few QNAP models and I've come across the QNAP TS-873. On Amazon here in Canada, the TS-873 is about the same price as the TS-673 so I figure for future scalability, it's best to go with the 8-bay unit.

I don't plan on running any business nor production VM's. I want to learn more about NSF and iSCSI and post maybe 5 VM's off the QNAP. My budget is around $1300 CAD, no higher than $1400.00.
I've seen the recommendations for the TVS-873 on this forum but the price that it sells for on Amazon is far outside of my budget.

I guess my only concern is the 2MB L2 cache on the AMD processor on the TS-x73 line. How limiting would that be for my tasks? Does the TS-873 seem like it would fit my requirements or is there another unit that might be more suitable?

I've looked at the 9 bay units from QNAP (5, 3.5" + 4, 2.5") but I do like having the PCIe slot.


Thanks

[dolbyman]

with the weak Canadian Dollar..you might be hard pressed to find a good deal within your budget

how many iops are you trying to push with your 5 VMs?

[socalTurnip]

with the weak Canadian Dollar..you might be hard pressed to find a good deal within your budget

how many iops are you trying to push with your 5 VMs?

I know, the deals **. But as a positive spin, I have a $500.00 Amazon gift card that I plan to use to help me pay for this. Hence the unit would actually cost me about $800.00
Regarding IOPS, this is new to me. My main reason to buy a better NAS than I had before is to learn more about storage (iSCSI, NFS, VAAI, IOPS) without buying enterprise gear or messing with our infrastructure at work.

I know I wouldn't be running anything really demanding. No SQL DB's or anything of that sort. I do not plan to use any of the Virtualization features on a NAS. I have a HP server that I plan to use for server purposes and the NAS will only be for VMFS datastores. I'd like to put a few VM's onto it but nothing crazy.

A WSUS server, domain controller, a linux server, PFsense possibly. Sorry, I'm not sure what the IOPS requirements would be.

[dolbyman]

hmm...well I guess it's worth a shot

add the fastest drives you can afford to the system (8x7200rpm+) and see how it works out ... I recently ran a rdp and db server (both are win server 2019) from a 951X via an esxi host ..and performance was decent (heavy db load was obvoisly slower than a ssd datastore on the esxi server itself)