homelab upgrade recommendations

Well if you want a proper upgrade, 40TB plus redundancy and space for a GPU, I'd say you don't want a mimi PC but a full-blown one. I built my server myself from components. It's hard to find good numbers on power consumption and that was one of my main concerns. I had a look at some PC magazines and what kind of mainboards they recommend for a home server. Figured I wanted 6 SATA ports and I started from that. Unfortunately said magazine doesn't have a good article right now, so I don't know what to recommend. Another way is to look for refurbished PCs. If they're some brand like Lenovo or Dell, you'll find the specs online. With a N100 mini pc, I'm not so sure if that's a big step up from your current setup... I don't think they have more internal harddrive ports or slots for GPUs than your current laptop.

I built a server a few years ago in a Fractal Design Node (big square box) which has 4 6TB drives in raid 5 for 18TB of storage and a 6 core AMD cpu. It cost around £1200 and half of that was the hard drives.

It's been really good, so if you're looking to build one yourself I'd recommend having a look at the case and the price of drives.

I think the N100 type CPUs are limited on PCIe lanes. You end up with less nvme, less sata, and usually no slots.

You can find x570 am4 boards for less than $100 now. Two nvme, 8 sata, 2 big slots and 2 small.

But all of that flexibility and expandability is going to cost you in power. My 7700x w/A380, 3 hdd is 125 watts 24/7. $10 a month on my power bill. I think those n100 mini PCs only have a 35w brick and idle at less than 15w.

I purchased a case, SilverStone Technology CS382 8-Bay. Around $200-225.

Bought used parts off eBay:

Asus P8Z77-M LGA 1155 DDR3 SDRAM Desktop Motherboard $75

32GB DDR3 1333 $35

LSI 6Gbps SAS HBA 9200-81 IT Mode P20 $35

Nvidia Quadro P620 2GB GDDR5 4x mini DisplayPort $70

I have six 12tb drives (seagate exos), purchased refurb from serverpartdeals.com and had great luck with them and their support. I found that on Reddit data hoarder sub.

I run Truenas. 4 drives for primary. 2 drives for backup of the first 4. And I have a qnap 4 bay dumb raid box for a third backup with old drives I had. My paranoia but not related really to the nas.

Anyway it's possible and I enjoy what I built. Also that case is loud, get a fan controller too.

I run a Proxmox cluster with 2x Dreamquest pro, each with 2x10TB had in an IcyBox, plus an external Raspberry Pie with a 12 TB disk for backup.

The disks are refurbished to keep the costs down but run in a mirror setup. So if one fails, I’m fine. I use an old laptop as a 3rd node and the main nodes replicate their load, so I‘m fine even when one node is dead.

There's lots of ways to skin this particular cat. My current approach is low powered Synology (j series?) for mass storage, then 1 litre PC's running proxmox for my compute power using their NVME for storage, all backed up to the Synology.