Thanks to this community I’ve learned and I’m feeling inspired. I’ve loved having an NAS for the last few years, but it’s woefully under powered for what I’m using it for these days.
So I’ve ordered some basic PC parts, gonna build a basic setup using an old CPU I got lying about and try the NAS OS I saw talked about on here recently.
TrueNAS looks like a good option with only slight fears it’ll go down the well known path to the dark side like so many free options before.
In any event, I’m looking forward to adding Nextcloud and Jellyfin, to trying out Docker and generally having more control over things.
Thanks again to you all for informing and inspiring.
I’ll be back if I get questions!
Don’t forget to donate to your favorite OSS projects.
When you end up having a mini homelab look into komo.do for container orchestration over the overkill options like kubernetes or portainer
I prefer dockge for putting all of my compositions in one place.
And being able to manage multiple hosts in one UI is the absolute tits. There are a few features I miss from portainer but none strong enough to pull me back. And no bs SaaS licensing and costs…
So what’s the threshold for ‘mini’ vs ‘you need to stop’…? Number of hosts, or number of containers, or number of public services, or…
Not sure, currently have 8 nodes and 40 apps running
i like TrueNas! and after trying out True Nas on bare metal for a year or two, now I run it as a VM under Proxmox.
so awesome
You’re the second person to suggest that approach. I’ll check it out before I do setup next week. Thanks!
Consider that a new power efficient CPU may be cheaper by consuming less electricity over a few years!
I hadn’t considered that! Thank you.
I’m hoping the OS, as it’s designed for this, is going to be helpful in getting the right balance with power usage.
You can calculate it !
Take your power usage and compute the cost over a year.
I will soon add a SSD because i finally moved from a RAID 1 to RAID 5 (so more HDDs), it consume more electricity.
I can measure how much power it draw because the server is on a smart plug. I calculated an additional 20-30€ a year of electricity, adding a SSD for read/write cache would allow the HDDs to stop spinning, make things faster and will be cost effective over a few years.This is why I’m using a refurbished mini PC as my home server. Lower wattage for constant uptime at home. Also very quiet.
Expect to be ostracised here but if your drives are “junk” (some have SMR), I got better parity performance with Windows Storage Spaces (WSS) than with Unraid. Recoverability and compatibility with old junk hardware was very good too, whereas the bits I had lying around gave me Linux driver conflicts. Trying to install ZFS on Linux gave me a headache, and I then realised I couldn’t expand the array easily when I found other cheap crappy drives to add. WSS doesn’t care, it just keeps trucking.
As for a licence, the old “upgrade from the windows 7 enterprise key that got leaked” trick did it for me. Never paid for it.
I found that I needed to spend more on components with better driver support to have a working NAS on Linux. Windows isn’t open source, but for me it was the cheapest total cost option, and you can still run your containers in it.
I reckon maybe performance is worse on write for WSS? I paid for a PrimoCache licence to fix that though, and now my SSD gets used for initial writes and slowly spools over to the array as the array is able to calculate parity and write with my 10 year old CPU.
