A Nas will be slower than a PC. They're more energy efficient though.
Yes, especially with Qnaps for sure. The last one that I had was on an Atom processor. Slow startup, slow shutdown, otherwise, not really much latency, but it does depend on what you are doing and the hardware that everything is running on.
The cpu in your
windows 7 pc is probably better than a Nas... We use one and while it works good, there are slow downs when too many people are using it and it's running it's backup / sync tasks.
Depends on what using. For a server,Xeon processors with ECC RAM (only real slowdown is if there is any error correcting) and an error will cause a Win desktop pc to complain and BSOD. I would (and have used) that type of processor/memory combo for just regular desktop production as well. It's a great combo, can actually be had quite cheaply if know how to play the used market as well (used server components isn't like getting used consumer grade products, so keep that in mind as well).
So now we're converting our server to truenas. If I were you.... I'd convert your
windows 7 PC, or a different PC into true Nas. It's almost as polished as Nas software, free, and you're running on way better hardware.
It's better compared to what Qnap has. In most instances, polish just means polish == newb friendly. Not much more compared to that. Just more abstraction away from what something can do. May or may not have it's merits, just depends on where one falls in that category.
And there's nothing wrong with doing it through
windows 7 either. Will a server be better? Sure... If you want to drop 10k on a server. I've had
windows 7 PC's have an uptime of 8 months. I only recently started to use a "true" server, and that's because I wanted to run a vSphere host and guy a good deal on one. Would I run a Normal PC as a domain controller? No... But as a file server is no problem.
Yes that is true, like I said, Win 7 would be better (unless one has certain later updates) compared to anything post Win 7 (which more than likely would be the case for any new Win machine that the OP would get) in terms of uptime and stability (although stability mileage may vary, some have had decent/maybe even great stability, others not so much) and among other things, but I would digress big time on that.
Basic file servers can be run essentially on potato hardware if needed just for basic file serving with low connection demands. But it's when everything else comes into play, that's when hardware requirements change. A Pi can be just fine for basic file server depending on workload and how storage of the files is handled. A NUC as well (Intel's x86_64 low powered version of the Pi).
Bot to mention in our current climate with ransomware running rampant, there's patches released so frequently youll be rebooting the server weekly anyways.
This is why I would suggest keeping production rigs off the internet, but with SaaS and all that BS, very hard to do if using that type of software as it is. Servers don't go down that frequently and in all honestly, compared to the majority of
Windows updates, if it's a unix-like server (which truenas is) a lot of the updates don't require a restart. Only if it's something like a kernel update etc does it require a restart. Even my Arch installs (which I do have every other day updates) don't require restarts.
Windows, not really so much. Little things in
Windows cause more need of a restart.
