Hopefully these kinds of posts are allowed in this community, but if not feel free to point me in the correct direction.

I currently have a Synology DS218+ (I believe, it’s one of the 2-bay + models) that I’ve been using for several years now as a home server/NAS, but I think it’s time to replace it with something new.

I’m debating building something from scratch and just throwing Linux on it. Despite having built my last 3 computers, I’m still pretty bad at understanding specs and planning out builds. I was hoping you fine folks would be able to help give me some suggestions.

The Synology is currently running (and I would expect to move these over to the new build) the following:

Plex
Tautulli
FreshRss
Mealie
Calibre
Stash

Having something purpose built for this means I’d probably explore also hosting my own music library, photo back up, pi-hole, vpn, etc.

Does anyone have suggestions of builds, or at least specific minimums I should ensure?

  • Human Crayon@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago

    I would highly suggest separating your storage from your compute. I’ve found this to be a cheaper and more flexible option over the years.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    2 months ago

    Keep using the NAS as long as it keeps being useful. Just for moving some services off onto something else, it sounds like you could just get a low power minipc of some sort and run your services there. An N100 or AMD APU would work just fine for Plex (transcoding on Intel may be a bit better).

    If you’d rather go the extra mile and build a larger machine with a disk array, you don’t need anything super wild for the CPU or memory based on the services you’ve listed.

  • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    61·
    2 months ago

    Off lease lenovo/HP/dell tiny/mini/micro. Keep the NAS for the storage, use the tiny/mini/micro as the media server. Anything with a 6th gen Intel and up will be decent on transcoding (use the igpu), 8th gen and up is better.

    Personally I’d put proxmox on it, and run each service as an LXC, or for the little ones, one LXC for docker and throw the docker containers on there.

    I have 7 tiny/mini/micros. 3 dell micro, 3 lenovo tiny, 1 HP mini (used to have 2 but one got replaced by a dell).

    Powerhouses with low power draw. Highly recommended.

    If you do build, I’d say an Intel arc GPU. The rest is just buying stuff that works well with Linux, which is most everything in terms of the basics.

  • Dran@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    Nothing beats the bang/buck ratio of used enterprise hardware (always buy new drives though if you care about the data)

    https://www.theserverstore.com/ https://www.serversupply.com/ https://www.servermonkey.com/

    I’ve bought from all of these in the past, personally I’m a fan of dells but there are arguments for just about any of the major 3 (dell, hp, sueprmicro)

    Personally my main server right now is an r630. 96 threads, 768gb of ram. With that many memory channels, not only can you run all of what you listed, you can even do medium-sized inferencing/diffusion if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

  • lepinkainen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Unraid has a Black Friday sale coming up, if you’re not set on spending time building a full Linux NAS from scratch Unraid is a lot easier as a base.

  • myersguy@lemmy.simpl.websiteEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    I’ve become a big fan of mini PC’s for home server use these days (with NAS systems for storage duties). Low power, low heat, low noise, and very affordable.

    Beelink on Amazon makes a good selection of them. Always watch for sales. I have several of their machines and have been pleasantly surprised by all of them. The latest addition was one of their N95 systems with 8GB of memory. It hosts Jellyfin, Deluge, Wireguard (client and server), dns, forgejo, etc.