I would not use nuc like this guy. Had one and it was slow and it have limited capacity.
Then I had my old PC and it was very good but I wanted more nvme disks and motherboard supported only 7.
Now I am migrating to threadripper which is a bit overkill but I will have ability to run 1 or two GPUs along with 23 nvme disks for example.
I also have a threadripper pro with tons of pcie lanes. Just wish there was an easier way to use newer datacenter flash and that it wasn't so expensive. Hoping those servers that hold 20 something u.2/3 drives start getting decommissioned soon as I hope my current batch of HDD's will be my last. Curious to know how you're using all those nvme drives?
Asus and Acer motherboards supports bifurcation on pcie slots. So for example you can enable this in BIOS and put Asus hyper extension card to put 4 nvme disk into pcie slot https://www.asus.com/support/faq/1037507/
There are other cards like that i.e. https://global.icydock.com/product_323.html This one have better support for smaller in size disks, much easier to swap disk but costs like 4 times more.
I think it could put even more drives in my new case I.e. using pcie to u2 card and the using 8 drives bays. But this would cost me probably like 3 times more just for the bay with connectors. and I do not need that much space.
https://global.icydock.com/product_363.html
If you like u2 drives then icydock provides solution for them too. Or if you want go cheaper there are other cards with slim-sas or mcio https://www.microsatacables.com/4-port-pcie-3-0-x16-to-u-2-s...
But u2 disks are at least 2 times more costly per GB. Like 40tb costs 10k$. This is too much IMO.
I'm your opposite :-)
Intel n100 with 32GB RAM and single big SSD here (but with daily backups).
Eats roughly 10 Watts and does the job.
If this does the job for you sure. For me they were very pricey at the time comparing to my old PC Intel core i3 that I had already lying around. And power cost does not matter really in my case.
I have two NUC’s (ryzen 7 and intel i5) they’re rock solid.
Yes, if this works sure why not. Few years back decent NUC cost was at least 1k$ dollars. And still it is quite small, so you cannot slam 8 ssds in there.
I did use my old PC and it was working very nice with 4 sata ssds, in raid 10.
And as I already said on other comment - in my case power does not matter much. Space too.