Hey!
I’ve decided that it’s time to finally get something resembling an actual server for my home setup, and I was hoping you folks could give me some pointers (given the current prices).
My current set up is just my old laptop with 2 external hard drives plugged in - one is the regular portal USB HDD, another is 3.5 HDD plugged via powered enclosure (ZFS and LUKS on both). I want to switch that for something relatively small, but extendable, as I want to add more disk space in the future. I’m selfhosting Plex, Immich and Navidrome, and occasionally some multiplayer games like Valheim. I’m not planning to use Proxmox or TrueNAS/whatever, I mostly just plan to throw Debian on it and spin everything in Docker.
I looked through some guides on https://selfhosting.sh/ and on Reddit, but that just got me more confused, as everyone keeps suggesting Optiplexes and NUCs, but I don’t get how to combine that with 20TB+ disk space while ensuring the disks are secure and well powered. Plus my understanding is most of those mini-PC’s/refurbished workstations use regular DDR3/4, whereas I was hoping to get ECC.
Should I go DIY route, or is there something I could get as a solid enough base to expand in the future? If DIY is the answer - what mobo/cpu/case should I get? My ideal budget (for everything excluding hard drives and maybe PSU since I have one lying around) is ~500 euros, but if paying a bit more would mean a substantially better deal - then I’d be OK with that. I’m in Berlin, so if you know any good local markets - that’d be great too.
Thanks!
UPD: So, I’ve learned of the existence of bargainhardware, which drastically changed my approach and so far I’m leaning towards https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/dell-poweredge-t330-tower-server
(Yes, I understand it’s loud and more power-hungry than some of the other options out there, but it does tick all of the boxes…)
I can’t say this is a good advice by itself; this is simply my setup as I was in your position just 1 month ago, maybe this gives you more ideas.
I recently bought an 16 GB non-ECC DDR5 (which is unnecessary, DDR4 works just fine) open-box 4-disk bay TerraMaster as my main server for the equivalent of around €400, thinking that in a distant future I can buy a different rack just for disks. This model has an Intel N150, which has the H.265 codec, which should handle the transcoding in your Plex instance (which, IMO, you should consider moving to Jellyfin instead in the new computer you end up getting). The 4-disk bay (there are some models with more bays) allows you to get some disks now and then fill up the bays later on if you want to. Note: I just realized this almost reads like a Terramaster ad, that’s not my goal; you can search for similar options from other fabricants.
As for the OS, I insist in recommending you TrueNAS, since it’s Debian-based, since it’s not like Proxmox where everything has to be VM, it’s simply Debian with a nice UI for spinning up Docker instances + disk/snapshot/backups management, all of which are optional: you can easily mount your disk pool and setup them up as a ZRAID (data redundancy in case of disk failure), stripe (no data redundancy), etc., organize everything in easy to use folders, schedule different snapshot schedules for different folders, etc. You can also easily mount Docker containers, either through the “app store” (a selection of Docker containers wrapped in a nice UI for configuration) or manually with docker-compose.yml files. IMO, you lose little, but gain a lot with the OS being already configured for a lot of the stuff you want to do, and the easy to use Web UI.
Why do you want ECC? (Hint: unless you’re running a business database dealing with financials, you don’t need it). I’ve run Windows server on desktop hardware since the 90’s with no issues, and today’s hardware is far better than what we had then.
The reason people settle on NUCs and SFF desktops is power. They virtually sip watts.
I don’t usually recommend specifics for someone but rather ideas and ways to look at your requirements, but given your requirements (20 TB), it would be worth considering a commercial NAS, or at least a NAS enclosure running a NAS OS like UnRAID or TrueNAS.
Expansion is generally not something I’d think about for a NAS (though it can be done today). I expand my NAS once a year (swap out one drive) but I keep 3 local copies - so if it failed I can restore locally rather than from a cloud backup.
So your data lives on a NAS, and you can then either run your services there (they mostly support containers, etc these days), but I’d get a NUC or SFF to host that stuff. It makes for nice separation and gives you some flexibility.
Back to SFF and NUC - my last desktop hardware idled at 100 watts. It was visible on my power bill and used more power than my lights or just about any other single device other than heat or stove.
My SFF server idles at just under 20 watts and peaks at 80 when I’m converting videos. It currently has 8Tb of storage, but I could easily get 20 in there, it would just be expensive.
Oh, and a good NAS can spin down drives to save power when idle, which for most of us is like 90% of the time (I have an ancient NAS as redundancy that does this - it idles around 5w).
Strong disagree. I ran non-ECC memory on my server and services would unexpectedly crash maybe once per week. Over the span of a year I had two databases get corrupted that cost me a lot of time to fix. I tried swapping sticks but it happened with all of them. I switched to ECC memory and the problems disappeared. I needed more memory anyway and the price delta for ECC was about $100. I didn’t have to swap CPUs or anything, AMD desktop CPUs and chipsets support it out of the box. ECC memory is absolutely worth it.
