I have an old Alienware r8 and several 2-4 TB HDDs gathering dust in a closet. The Alienware actually runs remarkably quiet and it occurred to me I could turn it into a DIY NAS.
I’m not entirely sure where to start though. Some immediate questions:
- What’s a good NAS OS to install?
- Any fun things I can do besides plex transcoding with a 1080 GPU?
- Would it make sense to run a Pixelfed/Mastodon server off this guy?
- Can I run a RAID on it without buying a separate HDD bay?
Background:
I already have a Synology NAS running Plex. It transcodes 1080p fine which is really all I need it for.
Other than a Plex port forward, I have zero experience putting services out on the public web (but would like to learn!).
TrueNAS Scale is the go to. Unraid is another popular option.
Local LLM. Look up Ollama.
You could. That could potentially use a lot of space or be very annoying you having to manage and moderate the instances.
What do you mean? Are you talking about a hardware RAID card, or can you physically stuff more than one disk drive into the chassis? For the first, it’ll depend on whether it has any open PCI Express slots. For the second, what do you see when you open it up? Are there 3.5" or 5.25" bays open?
Wanting to learn is an admirable goal. I’ve not done it myself, but the Linux Upskill Challenge might be a good place to start. Either that, or figure out something you might want to host yourself, then come back and ask for input when you run into trouble or have a question.
One way to avoid the pitfalls of hosting for others is hosting an instance just for yourself. Maybe immediate family too.
As for RAID, just go with TrueNAS software raid (courtesy of ZFS). All that is needed are physical bays and SATA cables/ports. You can buy cheap external bays if there aren’t enough on the PC.
Yeah an online instance would be a good place to start. Maybe a GoToSocial instance.
Pretty sure it has 2 HDD bays, so I was thinking I would do something similar to the Synology Hybrid RAID on a 4TB drive. On retrospect though this might be way too crippling of a move for a play server, so I might forgo the RAID idea.
The Linux Upskill Challenge looks perfect! I feel comfortable with about 40% of the table of contents. Should be a fun weekend of experimenting.
Thanks for the help!
If you’ve got two 3.5" bays, you could do a RAID 1 (or a mirror in ZFS terms) with them both. This works very nicely with a small SSD for booting. My TrueNAS server has a 120 GB SSD in the M.2 slot that TrueNAS is installed on, then I have an array of spinning disks that forms the main storage array.
If you are planning any sort of play environment that you might want to keep (like a Pixelfed instance) I’d strongly recommend RAID just for availability in the event of a drive failure. But more than that, backups. They are of number one importance. Before you turn up anything of any importance, figure out a backup strategy.
Thanks! I’ll stick to the RAID 1 option then. I was looking at S3 Glacier for backup when it comes to that. But I really don’t want to worry about it too much until I’ve really got something going that I plan to use longer term.