Thank you all, really appreciate the info.
Couple of things
. I think surveillance is a great deterrent, the see couple of camera's outside, might make them consider the next door neighbor. The reason I want to make sure I have my feeds in hand after something happens, is to catch these people. Not so much to get my stuff back, but to make sure they get what they deserve. I am building a wall unit that will have a space for the server too, but server can only be removed from the back. Hopefully that will be enough of a hindrance.
@SouthernYankee and
@area651, do you have any recommendations for make/model of NAS. I see there is a lot out there.
I agree with the deterrent idea and I definitely like the idea of it all not getting stolen. I'm just speculating that anyone breaking in, won't be looking to pillage a server rack. Your hood could be different than mine though. I'm not in a bad area by any measure but from talking with others, any break ins around here are looking for quick stuff and are by people who wouldn't recognize a $500 NAS from a $20 toaster.
Semi related thought would be that we should all keep in mind what the police will do. Hopefully you get a better picture/vid than just a humanoid/sasquatch looking figure committing the crime. Also if you DO get a clear(ish) pic, what will the police do? They'll likely go "yeah...that's a black/white/hispanic male. We don't know his name though so when we do catch them in the act, we can hopefully tie this back to him." Meaning they won't do some CSI themed investigation and determine that it's Paul Hanson who lives at 123 Oak Street and we'll go get him there. I'm not dismissing the idea of doing any of this hobby that we're doing. Just don't lose sight of what may happen and get grandiose ideas of how this will help the police solve a crime wave. Btw, imho, it's fun and hopefully helpful if ever needed so that's why I do it. If it wasn't, there's lots of other places to drop a grand.
Ok, on to the NAS part:
Just my opinion here but I don't buy the idea of getting a nas with high memory or cpu power. I don't offload any real compute needs onto a nas. I just use it for a big storage filing cabinet.
At any given time, my NAS bounces from 4-15% CPU usage and stays around 40% memory usage. It's live storing all my BI data as well as storing all my media for the home media server (that's in use by my household, including my sons remotely away at college).
I have a Synology DS418play. If you want to run VMs, then you'd want the next step up but when I need to run those, I have desktops that will do that. (I rarely need to fire up a VM.) I wanted removable drives and I wanted at least 4 (for expansion if I wanted to) and I like how synology does their hybrid raid. The absolute cheapest way to do NAS is to get an old PC (that likely takes more electricity) and just install 4 drives in it and then install OpenNAS and make it all yourself. The same could be said for a car though and it's unlikely that anyone here drives a car they built themselves. (Yes I'm sure someone will say "I built this car myself" but in reality, you put together the parts for a chevrolet all into a chevy chassis. I think you get the drift...)