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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
