I need some advice on what hardware to buy for my home setup. I see a lot of posts talking about software, but not so much hardware. I would love to have a box I can buy and start setting up stuff.
A rack seems a bit expensive, my initial budget I feel is reasonable starting out is about $500-$800.
I’ve been looking at mini PCs, what are your thoughts on ASUS PN52? Just throwing that into the post to give a pin point of what I’m looking for.
I’m planning on hosting
- Bitwarden
- Nextcloud
- Plex
- Standard notes
- Lemmy instance
- Web server
- Openresty
And need to be able to upgrade storage etc. for future proofing.
Thankful for all insights, tips, and suggestions!
I assume you’re not really experienced with storage servers? Then I would likely recommend a Synology NAS. They give you great software that you can easily configure without the need of deeper knowledge of the inner workings. I started with a Synology and didn’t regret it. It just worked and gave me reliable storage so I could concentrate on the other parts of my homelab. It comes with a price though and you mostly pay for the software.
If you aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty or prefer to use an open source storage solution from the beginning, you might consider Unraid or TrueNAS. The latter is more “enterprisey”, the former seems to be more beginner friendly (but I haven’t used it personally).
Yes build your own NAS. TrueNAS Scale is really great as it can run containers and VMs.