Hello I’ve been playing around with an old laptop as my home server for 1 year and I think that now it’s a good time to upgrade to something better since it feels a bit too slow.
I was thinking to buy a synology but I would prefer something custom because I hate that sometimes the manufacturers decide to abandon support or change all their terms of service.
My budget is about 1000$ USD, I’m looking for it to have at least 20TB and the option to later add a graphics card would be nice.
What do you recommend to buy? Also what software do you recomend? Also could it work with an n100 mini PC?
I’ve been using Ubuntu server, with docker containers for several services, but I mainly use it for Nextcloud
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Well if you want a proper upgrade, 40TB plus redundancy and space for a GPU, I’d say you don’t want a mimi PC but a full-blown one. I built my server myself from components. It’s hard to find good numbers on power consumption and that was one of my main concerns. I had a look at some PC magazines and what kind of mainboards they recommend for a home server. Figured I wanted 6 SATA ports and I started from that. Unfortunately said magazine doesn’t have a good article right now, so I don’t know what to recommend. Another way is to look for refurbished PCs. If they’re some brand like Lenovo or Dell, you’ll find the specs online. With a N100 mini pc, I’m not so sure if that’s a big step up from your current setup… I don’t think they have more internal harddrive ports or slots for GPUs than your current laptop.
Best bang for your buck is business workstations. $1000 is a fairly big budget and is likely a but overkill. Get 3 decently speced workstations and put storage and fast networking in them. Cluster them and then setup high availability. Depending on your setup you could also modify one to also be a NAS. Get a sata or SAS card and put some drives in the chassis. You may need to get dirty but that’s the fun part.
I got a terramaster nas and I’m super happy https://www.terra-master.com/global/f4-5067.html
The main reason to choose it is that it is just a PC in the form factor of a NAS. You can just boot it from a pendrive and install your favourite operating system. I had a Qnap before, and while it was great to start, self hosting wasn’t the best experience on their OS.
this is a small form factor, it should be low power consumption (I’ve never measured to confirm it) and supports both nvme and sata drives. Currently I’ve an nvme for the OS and two sata for storage. CPU is powerful enough to run home assistant, vpn, pihole, commafeed, and a bunch of other Docker images. I just plan to increase the ram soonish because the stock feels a little constrained.
I run a Proxmox cluster with 2x Dreamquest pro, each with 2x10TB had in an IcyBox, plus an external Raspberry Pie with a 12 TB disk for backup.
The disks are refurbished to keep the costs down but run in a mirror setup. So if one fails, I’m fine. I use an old laptop as a 3rd node and the main nodes replicate their load, so I‘m fine even when one node is dead.
I purchased a case, SilverStone Technology CS382 8-Bay. Around $200-225.
Bought used parts off eBay:
Asus P8Z77-M LGA 1155 DDR3 SDRAM Desktop Motherboard $75
32GB DDR3 1333 $35
LSI 6Gbps SAS HBA 9200-81 IT Mode P20 $35
Nvidia Quadro P620 2GB GDDR5 4x mini DisplayPort $70
I have six 12tb drives (seagate exos), purchased refurb from serverpartdeals.com and had great luck with them and their support. I found that on Reddit data hoarder sub.
I run Truenas. 4 drives for primary. 2 drives for backup of the first 4. And I have a qnap 4 bay dumb raid box for a third backup with old drives I had. My paranoia but not related really to the nas.
Anyway it’s possible and I enjoy what I built. Also that case is loud, get a fan controller too.
Ideally you should run ddr4 so you aren’t leaving performance on the table
I was limited by the processor and some existing ram which basically dictated my purchases to save money.
You’re completely right though, a more modern system would be similar in price and more capable.
I blew my budget on drives and a hot swap case. The rest is easy to upgrade when the time comes.
Then why did you go SAS? Sata would’ve been a lot cheaper
They are sata drives.
Seagate Exos X16. 6 of them refurb is still $800.
The case is hot swap with just an hba connection so I can let zfs do it’s thing.
One of the best choice is an old entreprise tower factor server, but it has some downside, it’s a bit power hungry, do not work if you can’t support the noise at all (tower factors are not loud but not silent either). The positive is that it’s really cheap his power (got mine 120$ for 3To, 12vcores, and 32 ddr4 ram).
EDIT : buy some used HDD, easily getting 20tb for around 300$
I have a Synology. I love it, but if you’re on a budget build one server and use that for storage and hosting all your stuff.
Use PCPartsPicker and build yourself a full desktop tower. Something like https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gHLHxg. You can get a lot for your money on the used market, but it will use way more power and will be slower.
For above build I picked lower to mid range components, but you can see what matters to you most. Maybe get a CPU with more cores and less storage to start and add more storage later. Or do the opposite if you don’t care about CPU but want more storage now.
Some hardware notes, do get AMD CPU and stay away from Intel. Last 2 years of their CPUs are plagued with major issues. Do also get DDR5 ram and whatever motherboard supports that. Get a fast NVMe for your OS drive. 1Tb should be plenty.
Finally don’t install Ubuntu on it. Two options for OS: if you want to use it as a nas then use TrueNAS Scale otherwise use ProxMox. Then you can create a virtual machine on either one of those and install Ubuntu on that if you still want to. You can also run containers on both of those.
