Hi!
I have an old gaming pc (i5 9400F) with 16gb of ram that has been acting as my home server with proxmox. It’s quite large and quite loud and very overpowered for what I’m using it for (home assistant, Minecraft server, some lxc containers) and a mini pc (amd 5800h with 16gb ram).
I want to sell my gaming pc, place the HDD into a NAS (and samba share my plex library), and potentially grab a low powered N100 minipc to pick up the lxc containers and home assistant that my gaming pc is running.
New to self hosting so wondering if this is a good setup or if there are any glaring issues you see with this. What is your setup?
There’s a decent supply of not humongous mATX cases with decent drive options. I found the JONSBO N4 which looked neat, but then saw this reddit thread saying it’s kinda poopy (but see the top comment for a fix). But fancy features like hot swap bays make them pretty expensive. If you don’t want hot swap there’s a ton of mATX cases with 4 drive bays that just aren’t marked as anything special. Cases with power supply basements tend to hide at least 2 drives down there. Or there’s the classic drives in the front and you can fit a ton of 3.5" drives up front in an mATX or even ITX formfactor.
If you’re planning on upgrading I’d highly suggest getting a case with at least 1 more free HDD bay. Replacing a drive in ZFS is a LOT quicker than resilvering a drive. I just did that the other day and I actually thought it was broken it went so quickly.
The N2 and N3 also look pretty neat, but they’re mini-ITX, so I’d need to either buy a new mobo or wait until I upgrade one of our SFX PCs.
My current NAS box is way too big, since it’s basically a full tower and I only have one GPU and 3 drives in there, so 80% of the space is completely wasted. It’s also idle most of the time and never does anything intense, so it’s not like I need the cooling either.
Good call. I currently only have 2, and I was shopping for a 4-bay so I could run a second mirror pair, but getting 5 makes a lot of sense to replace a failing drive w/o yanking it out (maybe it’ll function well enough to help copy to the new drive).