Hello I’ve been playing around with an old laptop as my home server for 1 year and I think that now it’s a good time to upgrade to something better since it feels a bit too slow.

I was thinking to buy a synology but I would prefer something custom because I hate that sometimes the manufacturers decide to abandon support or change all their terms of service.

My budget is about 1000$ USD, I’m looking for it to have at least 20TB and the option to later add a graphics card would be nice.

What do you recommend to buy? Also what software do you recomend? Also could it work with an n100 mini PC?

I’ve been using Ubuntu server, with docker containers for several services, but I mainly use it for Nextcloud

  • @scholarEnglish
    6•1 day ago

    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.

    • JustEnoughDucksEnglish
      1•2 hours ago

      This is a good way to do it.

      I went one smaller with the Node 304 which only can do 4 HDDs with a GPU inserted. Going used for consumer desktop CPU is the most powerful play for the money I think.

      This is a good path forward OP for a pretty powerful server

      • Node 804
      • Used AM4 motherboard ( microatx B550) (can be around 150€)
      • used 5700X or similar (seen as low as 100€)
      • new 500W power supply
      • 32GB DDR4 3200 ram in 16GB sticks
      • WD red plus 10TB helium filled for balance of noise and performance and price. My 10TB drives are as quiet as my 4TB. My scheme is ZFS mirror of 4TB (2 drives) for important docs, and 10TB drives for non critical data. Drives are by far the most expensive unless you get good second hand drives
      • if you want to do Jellyfin media server, pick up an arc A310