Building a new home server
Building a new home server
Hopefully these kinds of posts are allowed in this community, but if not feel free to point me in the correct direction.
I currently have a Synology DS218+ (I believe, it's one of the 2-bay + models) that I've been using for several years now as a home server/NAS, but I think it's time to replace it with something new.
I'm debating building something from scratch and just throwing Linux on it. Despite having built my last 3 computers, I'm still pretty bad at understanding specs and planning out builds. I was hoping you fine folks would be able to help give me some suggestions.
The Synology is currently running (and I would expect to move these over to the new build) the following:
Plex
Tautulli
FreshRss
Mealie
Calibre
Stash
Having something purpose built for this means I'd probably explore also hosting my own music library, photo back up, pi-hole, vpn, etc.
Does anyone have suggestions of builds, or at least specific minimums I should ensure?
I've become a big fan of mini PC's for home server use these days (with NAS systems for storage duties). Low power, low heat, low noise, and very affordable.
Beelink on Amazon makes a good selection of them. Always watch for sales. I have several of their machines and have been pleasantly surprised by all of them. The latest addition was one of their N95 systems with 8GB of memory. It hosts Jellyfin, Deluge, Wireguard (client and server), dns, forgejo, etc.
big fan of mini PC’s
Same, but just be careful if you venture outside of the "reputable" vendors.
I bought one recently from Aliexpress, and while it's perfectly functional, it's using an ethernet chipset that doesn't have in-kernel drivers so I have to keep compiling new drivers for it every time the kernel upgrades.
Not the end of the world, but an annoyance that I could do without, and not something a slightly more expensive version of what I got would have.
I've actually heard of Beelink before, just didn't think about them for this.
I'm assuming I can have Plex running on the Beelink and just mount the drive on my Synology with all my files?
I've definitely been hitting a bit of a CPU bottleneck on the Synology recently. It looks like the Beelink's might use a newer version of the same Intel Celeron's. Passmark gives a mark of 4078 vs 1197 for the mini PC one, so I'm assuming it will be plenty better but I'm curious if you've noticed any issues with it.
I recently added a used mini pc to my lab and it has a Ryzen 3550H, 16GB ram and 512GB nvme; it cost less than 100€ total, hits almost 8000 passmark. Just to give you an idea of what you can get on the used market, I wouldn't buy a new Celeron pc myself.
I would highly suggest separating your storage from your compute. I’ve found this to be a cheaper and more flexible option over the years.
Off lease lenovo/HP/dell tiny/mini/micro. Keep the NAS for the storage, use the tiny/mini/micro as the media server. Anything with a 6th gen Intel and up will be decent on transcoding (use the igpu), 8th gen and up is better.
Personally I'd put proxmox on it, and run each service as an LXC, or for the little ones, one LXC for docker and throw the docker containers on there.
I have 7 tiny/mini/micros. 3 dell micro, 3 lenovo tiny, 1 HP mini (used to have 2 but one got replaced by a dell).
Powerhouses with low power draw. Highly recommended.
If you do build, I'd say an Intel arc GPU. The rest is just buying stuff that works well with Linux, which is most everything in terms of the basics.
Nothing beats the bang/buck ratio of used enterprise hardware (always buy new drives though if you care about the data)
https://www.theserverstore.com/ https://www.serversupply.com/ https://www.servermonkey.com/
I've bought from all of these in the past, personally I'm a fan of dells but there are arguments for just about any of the major 3 (dell, hp, sueprmicro)
Keep using the NAS as long as it keeps being useful. Just for moving some services off onto something else, it sounds like you could just get a low power minipc of some sort and run your services there. An N100 or AMD APU would work just fine for Plex (transcoding on Intel may be a bit better).
If you'd rather go the extra mile and build a larger machine with a disk array, you don't need anything super wild for the CPU or memory based on the services you've listed.
Unraid has a Black Friday sale coming up, if you’re not set on spending time building a full Linux NAS from scratch Unraid is a lot easier as a base.
That's true, but they also seem to be very power hungry and noisy. I built a fanless server which is consuming 11-12 Watts in idle.
I don’t know half that software you’re talking about running but I don’t find home servers really need to be that powerful. Companies like Dell and Lenovo have historically done cash back offers on small tower servers. I’m still running a Dell T20 I got like 10 years ago. Maybe keep an eye out for something like that if you’re not in a rush. I only ended up paying about £100 for mine.