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
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.
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.
This is a good way to do it.
I went one smaller with the Node 304 which only can do 4 HDDs with a GPU inserted. Going used for consumer desktop CPU is the most powerful play for the money I think.
This is a good path forward OP for a pretty powerful server
- Node 804
- Used AM4 motherboard ( microatx B550) (can be around 150€)
- used 5700X or similar (seen as low as 100€)
- new 500W power supply
- 32GB DDR4 3200 ram in 16GB sticks
- WD red plus 10TB helium filled for balance of noise and performance and price. My 10TB drives are as quiet as my 4TB. My scheme is ZFS mirror of 4TB (2 drives) for important docs, and 10TB drives for non critical data. Drives are by far the most expensive unless you get good second hand drives
- if you want to do Jellyfin media server, pick up an arc A310
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 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.
