Hi!

Originally, I just wanted advice for an NAS to host my videos and tv-series I aquired in the last couple years but whilst researching, I found a couple things that I think are neat, but have no idea how to start.

First things first: I wanted originally a QNAP TS-364 to host my movie/series collection to consolidate everything and don’t have to switch between drives any more. After finding this community, I’m toying around with the idea that I could build something myself, and use it to fix some things I want to fix some time now.

But for this task, I could use some help/advice to where to start, hardware, software, the works.

For latency / up- & downloadspeed, I’d like to have the server at home, fairly quiet, low power consumption and able to “stream” everything (movies / series) over LAN to my TV(s) or PC, maybe music to my mobile sometime in the future.

I’d like to use pi-hole for adblocking, host some non-media-files to get rid of Dropbox but keep its funcitonality to sync these files between two/three physical locations, including one mobile device (android) and sync passwords for my accounts. I guess a VPN for syncing would be benefitial.

In the future, I may want to add a usenet downloader but I’m not sure about that. Also, i just flew over the “awesome-selfhosted software” resource and my mind is kinda blown, so I may want to add some software to the list later.

Storage requirements: currently at least 12TB for media, upgradeable, no RAID needed ATM, JBOD would suffice but you never know.

To cut to the chase:

  • What hardware would you suggest? Off the shelf or DIY (I’m no stranger to building PCs and installing OSes. (Bonus points if sub 250 Euro without storage)
  • What OS would you recommend?
  • What software would you recommend?

Thanks in advance Andy

  • @thejoker8814English
    3•1 year ago

    Many given good advice on hardware, and there are plenty other threads with a lot of good recommendations.

    Regarding OS, I would recommend to ease into it, and try some before committing. Just try a few services, how stable it is and if the configuration complexity meets your personal learning expectations. (Self hosting is only fun, as long as you can get everything up and running. If you need 36hrs of troubleshooting for every 2nd problem, that awe for elf hosting melts pretty fast.)

    I started myself with OMV 0.x, and since then it’s gotten pretty decent. But I switched to plain Debian and CLI tool. After learning enough using OMV as my starting point. I also tried FreeNAS in the beginning, but that wasn’t for me.

    And I recently discovered CasaOS, wich is pretty neat and has a lot of benefits, but I haven’t tested it yet.