They are absolutely great except: - you need a beefier GPU for transcoding. It heats up fast under heavy load and most builds are fanless. - you start to have NAS requirements / +2 hard drives, RAID etc. There are a few chinese motherboards/minipc options now that do 6 SATAs or 4 NVMEs (via PCIE 3.0 x1) but you will be quickly constrained.

It is the perfect gateway drug setup though.

Oh goodness, I would never make this thing into a NAS. It’s a compute node with bootable storage and a second SSD for temporary storage of transcodes, nothing more.

Speaking of transcodes, I haven’t had an issue with either unit despite both handling hardware transcoding on a semi-regular basis (one for Plex, one for Jellyfin). The system cranks through them pretty decently provided you’re doing one or two at a time, and I’ve had no heating issues with them jammed in a rack with my NAS and network kit. The hardest part was getting Intel’s proprietary drivers working for such a feature, and that was more a (lack of) skill issue on my end than anything else.