I’m looking to re-purpose an old desktop into a multi-purpose home server. I’m looking for some advise on how to set things up in a way that won’t bite me in the ass later. I’m a confident Linux user, but have limited docker experience. I’m looking at using TrueNAS scale for: straight cloud storage, syncthings, home assistant, and tailscale to access it. If things go swimmingly, I might add jellyfin or *arr apps.

Here’s the hardware I already have:

  • i7 6700
  • 32 GB DDR4 (non-ECC)
  • GTX 1060
  • Storage:
    • 1 TB NVME SSD
    • 250 GB SATA SSD
    • 4x 4 TB WD Black HDD

So, here are my noob questions:

  • Is this system capable enough to handle the things I want to do?
  • My first pass at research says I should use TrueCharts for Tailscale. For Home Assistant, should I also install through TrueCharts? I was reading that you can’t install community docker plugins for home assistant, but I’m not sure if that’s something I’ll need. I also don’t know if I that’s something I need. The alternative is a separate VM, but that seems a lot more complicated.
  • How should I set up my drives? Should the 1 TB NVME drive be the boot drive, is that better used for something else. I’ve done some basic reading on vdevs/pools, but I’m not sure how syncthings/home assistant/other apps fit into the picture. Any good resources you could point me to for understanding this better?
  • BombOmOmEnglish
    0•1 year ago

    That system is plenty capable, in fact you could drop out the GPU if you don’t have anything that will specifically be using it. It’s just going to draw power when all you need is a video-out port. The qty of RAM is particularly good, will provide plenty of cache for the array and the CPU is strong enough you could enable full-drive encryption and not have it be a bottleneck (assuming that is something you want).

    TrueNAS’ boot drive doesn’t need much space or speed, might as well boot from the 250GB SSD and save the NVME SSD for w/e else you want.

    For array-type, a RAID 5 (or ZFS equivalent) is going to be your best setup. Will use one drive as parity and the other three for storage. A single drive failure is allowed with no data loss.