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.

  • @[email protected]BEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    DNS Domain Name Service/System
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
    Plex Brand of media server package

    3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 13 acronyms.

    [Thread #32 for this sub, first seen 12th Aug 2023, 22:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • stownEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    You may want to check out TrueNAS Scale for the OS, it is designed to be a NAS OS. You can run containers like Plex and PiHole from it.

    • @gdog05English
      4•1 year ago

      I don’t think I can recommend True NAS for beginners over Unraid. I started down this road about a year ago and did start with Truenas. The apps have been nothing but trouble for me and I’ve read similar from several others. I’m in the process of moving to Unraid now because of it as well as sharing permissions causing performance issues.

      • stownEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Unraid is paid only if you have over 3(?) drives.

        I personally run Proxmox with TrueNAS virtualized and an HBA card passed through. All my “apps” run in VMs on Proxmox and I only use TrueNAS as a NAS.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    I have been selfhosting for 2 years on a Ryzen 3600 bought from Aliexpress, maybe I paid like 90USD.

    I use unRaid, which has been really easy to learn, you can achieve the same without it, but it’s simpler for us newbies.

    You can easily setup Pihole on it, but what I liked the most is how simple is to use NPM+Cloudflare Tunnels+Whatever you want to expose to the internet without having to open ports on your router

    The first thing I selfhosted was Plex+Sonarr+Radarr, my friends and family loves it.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    I was looking for something simmilar and went for DIY PC (I had some components laying around tho). I guess you want 7th gen or newer intel cpu (with quick sync) for easier streaming. I have cheap intel g3930 with 8gb ram, atx mobo and atx psu in custom case running silently at ~25W from the wall. Debian OS, OMV and pihole bare metal, and almost everything else running in docker. Nextcloud as dropbox replacement, servarr for media download/stream (jellyfin, radarr, sonarr, lidarr, prowlarr etc). Prowlarr can use any torrent/usenet and jellyfin is the best media streaming service imo. Duckdns and wireguard for remote connection. Im running 30+ services in total and looks like Ill have to add more ram if I continue increasing the number. I also have another pihole running on raspberry pi to keep my network alive if server goes down.

    Im new in selfhosting and I found my setup as next level experience. Even my partner is amazed hehe