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

The scene uploads to their own ftp servers. Someone who has access to those servers then uploads to usenet or torrent sites.

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.