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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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 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.
You mention about getting an AMD cpu, and I’ve heard similar stories about Intel quality lately, however I’ve also heard in the past that AMD cpus aren’t very good at going low power. Electricity is expensive and I want it to idle as low as possible. Plus for my build, I’d certainly make use of quicksync on an Intel CPU.
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/Nutbolt/saved/#view=rrchkL
Any thoughts as I’m looking for opinions on the intel vs amd but also on my proposed build. Thanks
AMD processors also have worse video encoding compared to Intel, which matters for Jellyfin.
There’s a ton of sources, but gamersnexus did the most in depth coverage that spans many months and many videos. Stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVdmK1UGzGs&t=1s. Majority of all Intel 13000 and 14000 CPUs are effected. And the new generation that just came out just seems to have extremely poor performance for the money as compared to equivalent AMD CPUs that both perform better and cost less.
As for the power consumption, in the generation you are looking at they are about the same or Intel is worse. In your build you picked i7-14700. Here’s a decent read from gamersnexus again: https://gamersnexus.net/cpus/intel-desperate-i7-14700k-cpu-review-benchmarks-gaming-power. Give it a read and then go with an AMD processor :)
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 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.
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 ~$10/tb.
One of the best choice is an old entreprise tower factor server, but it has some downside, it’s a bit power hungry, do not work if you can’t support the noise at all (tower factors are not loud but not silent either). The positive is that it’s really cheap his power (got mine 120$ for 3To, 12vcores, and 32 ddr4 ram).
EDIT : buy some used HDD, easily getting 20tb for around 300$
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 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.
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.
