Look for refurbished units, you can get enterprise grade units for like half the retail price. I recently got a refurbished APC from refurbups.com. Comes with brand new batteries, mostly rack mountable stuff. Ended up being a little over half the price of a brand new one with shipping. Can’t tell at a glance if they ship to Canada, but if not I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a similar Canada based site you could find.

Got a refurbished APC coming in today. Looking forward to not having to worry about my NAS drives or losing internet because or a split second power blip.

Not really, its mostly a hobby/nerdy/because I can thing. I am a software engineer with a decade of experience. The job sometimes requires virtual sys admin work (VM/container, cloud networking, etc). Setting up my own baremetal cluster has given me more insight into how things work, especially on the network side. Most of my peers take for granted that traffic gets in or out of a cluster, but I can actually troubleshoot it or design with it in mind.

I considered it but RAM is very limited on the NAS and the cluster nodes, it’s my primary bottleneck. it would also be more volitile. the two SSDs are RAID 1 redundant, just like the underlying HDDs, in addition to the built in power loss protection on the drives. RAM discs are great if you can spare them and have a UPS though.

Fyi you will not be able to do live video transcoding with a raspberry pi. I overclocked my pi4’s CPU and GPU and it just can’t handle anything but direct play and maybe audio stream transcoding, though I’ve never had luck with any transcoding period. I either download a format I know can direct play or recently started using tdarr (server on pi, node running on my desktop when I need it) to transcode into a direct play format before it hits my Jellyfin library. Even just using my AMD Ryzen 5 (no GPU) it transcodes like 100x faster than a tdarr node given 2 of the rpi cpu cores. You could probably live transcode with a decent CPU (newer Intel CPUs are apparently very good at it) if you run Jellyfin on the NAS but then you’re at odds with your low power consumption goals. Otherwise rpi Jellyfin is great.

Good luck, I’d like to build a NAS myself at some point to replace or supplement my Synology.