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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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$
An N100 would be fine, I use it for my own server. Despite it being about as fast as an i5-6500T with a general benchmark, quicksync makes a big difference when encoding video with e.g. Jellyfin. I “upgraded” from a i5-6500T to a custom built N100 server and the performance improved a lot. However, if you plan on hosting game servers it probably won’t be enough.
I think the N100 type CPUs are limited on PCIe lanes. You end up with less nvme, less sata, and usually no slots.
You can find x570 am4 boards for less than $100 now. Two nvme, 8 sata, 2 big slots and 2 small.
But all of that flexibility and expandability is going to cost you in power. My 7700x w/A380, 3 hdd is 125 watts 24/7. $10 a month on my power bill. I think those n100 mini PCs only have a 35w brick and idle at less than 15w.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/yqX3C8
$650 for the box leaves you $350 for drives and a 10Gb NIC. I’ve been using serverpartdeals refub drives with good results. They’re ~$10/tb.
I built a server a few years ago in a Fractal Design Node (big square box) which has 4 6TB drives in raid 5 for 18TB of storage and a 6 core AMD cpu. It cost around £1200 and half of that was the hard drives.
It’s been really good, so if you’re looking to build one yourself I’d recommend having a look at the case and the price of drives.
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 have a couple Aoostar R7’s (4x in a hyper-converged ceph+cloud-hypervisor+k0s cluster, but that’s overkill for most). They have been rock solid. They also have an n100 version with less storage expansion if you don’t need it. My nodes probably idle at about 20w fully loaded with drives (2x nvme, 1x sata SSD, 1x sata HDD). Running ~15 containers and a VM or 2. You should be able to easily get 1 (plus memory and drives) for $1000. Throw proxmox and/or some NAS OS on it and you’re good to go.
There’s lots of ways to skin this particular cat. My current approach is low powered Synology (j series?) for mass storage, then 1 litre PC’s running proxmox for my compute power using their NVME for storage, all backed up to the Synology.
With Synology your not getting the latest greatest hardware your basically buying the DSM operating system.
DSM is a really nice one stop shop though.
Unless you know you’re doing something DSM can’t support it’s hard to go wrong with Synology.
Just make sure whatever version you buy has access to the DSM apps. For instance, you said you use docker, so make sure the Synology device you’re interested in works with Container Management.
The rat dogs have it locked on mine, others with exact same SOC have it, which makes me very unhappy
I just asked a very similar question over here: https://reddthat.com/post/29255208
Where I had put together a proposed self build and looking for feedback on it.
I’ve been running Unraid for a few years and it’s been great and really user friendly as well.
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.
