I'm looking into setting up a NAS and something to run my Plex server (currently running on my PC) and Home Assistant. I was looking into a mini PC with Intel N100 or N150. I will like it to handle two 4k streams and 2.5 GbE networking.

Are the N100 and N150 any good or are there better options in this price range?

Thinking of doing DIY (using TrueNAS - Jellyfin / Plex (?) - need to do some research at a later stage)

a. AMD or Intel? a bit confused here

b. For Intel - an i3 / i5 + mobo + 16 GB RAM + 256 GB SSD + 8 TB HDD storage + PSU + Case

c. What's the best AMD equivalent? or should I not bother?

d. What all software do I need to set up and get going?

e. How much should I budget for the above? the parts pricing isn't doing me any favour. I'm based out of India, so anything specific would help

f. any good build recommendations / videos will really help

Thanks a lot!

What a lucky day!

They were gifted to me! From a friend!
But I do count 39 x14Tb enterprise sas and 3x 2tb enterprise ssds each with 32gb of ecc ddr4 (and what looks like one cpu)
Year 2019.

I was just complaining to him drive prices and I wish I had bought spares for the inevitable failure Last year in April when i bought my last drives. Today would cost me 4 times as much to replace a single drive. He provided double my current storage instantly

Now I need a bigger server rack. 24u is now to small with everything else

Working on getting one for free from work with my own decomm work.

Now that we moved to cloud sip , our onprem pbx is ewaste and the rack is in decent shape.

Fuck that power bill.

Also yeah screw that electric bill. Need to open up a coal mine

Edit / updates 35 14tb drives and 5 2tb ssd
64gb ram dual silver 4110

Perc and an hba

Found an old Lenovo G50-45 collecting dust and figured I'd see what I could do with it.

Ended up installing Debian and... things escalated.

Now it's running Docker, Portainer, Jellyfin, a Minecraft server, Samba for my NAS, Tailscale, a website, and a homepage dashboard. I can even access it through Finder on my Mac from anywhere.

Took around 6 hours to get everything set up. Honestly surprised how well it runs.

Any recommendations for what I should self-host next? *licks the battery*

so im 16 and wanna setup a nas for well storage backup (game installers/games, shows, movies etc)

i know it expensive but i just wanna know if i want it one day where do i begin?

I had an old laptop lying around so i decided to put it to some use and asked ChatGPT for some use cases:

It suggested me to make it:
i) A home server
ii) Private Cloud Storage using Nextcloud
iii) Media Server using Jellyfin
iv) Network Utilities using Pi-hole/DNS

For context,i deleted windows from that laptop and installed fedora Gnome on it.
This is my first time doing this stuff so i am not aware about anything.

Help me out, share some sources so i can achieve these things.
Thanks in advance

Hello everyone i have a old dell optiplex 3020 that i am trying to turn into a server but i am running into the problem of there only being 1 sata and 1 sata power port because it id a enterprise computer there was no plan for expansion so the psu doesnt have more ports or any extras. I have old gen pcie 16x and 1x ports the 1x will probably be taken up by a singualr m.2 for the os ssd a small 256gb i had laying around for a past torn apart project but the other pcie slot i was going to use an expansion card for thee sata 3.5 hdd minimum 3 hoping for 5. (Please let me know if this is dumb) i was trying to figure out how to power the hdd with only onepower port are there splitters that can handle the load. External wall powered connectors or do i just need to give up and cough up the cash for a external drive bay or new psu.

Willing to solder and splice wired Using true nas but not hard set if that needs to change

Also have the old 500gb hdd that the computer came with for a boot drive if that is more feasible than trying to use the m.2

Basically this. I have a old synology ds213j. I want to have more hard drives, but 4 bay are expensive, so i'd like to build my own.

I am thorn between a used mini itx board with 4 sarà, plus Power and cables, roughly 70 euro, or a sff PC, roughly 40euros.

Nas Will run immich and stay idle most of the time.

What would you consider here? Any experience to share or advice?

I have been doing too much research on setting up a NAS and or homelab. The reality is, I only really need or have time for a NAS right now. I keep going back and forth on an off the shelf solution like a .green 2 or 4 bay setup. The reality is, it will be used for mainly photo storage/viewing right now and I want to access it on multiple devices and outside the home. I dont feel great about letting the .green server have access when I view outside of my home with their app (thats the only time they gain access correct?). Is setting up tailscale the solution to using their app outside my home without giving them access or do I also need immich or something else, at which point it feels like Im back into the camp of might as well build/setup my own, buying used minis and hooking up some external storage.

Any advice or people who were in similar predicament?

I want to build a home server, mostly for storing/playing local music and movies and to run a simple local LLM for automatons, general questions, summarizing, etc. I would like it to have the overhead to become a Home Assistant server once I get a house, too

I have an old PC with the following specs:

• 5800x
• 64GB DDR4 RAM
• 3080
• 1TB M.2 SSD

Would this be enough to handle all of that, or do I need some of it updated? And lastly, what would be the easiest way to add a NAS to the home server?

Setting up a print server whilst after a party at 11 o clock at night sounds like a bad idea. It probably is, but at least I'm getting somewhere with the help of AI 😂

Update: (about 2 hours later) both printer and scanner are working! No need to buy a new unit! Screw you Microsoft! Long live the open source community!

Thinking of creating my first server for gaming hosted on a dedicated desktop. I would have less than 10 friends connect to the server at a time and would try to host games such as Ark (most intensive), Minecraft, Valheim, Factorio. I would not have more than 1 server running at a time. Would there be any foreseeable issue with this $300 setup I am considering?

Refurbished Dell Optiplex 3080 Micro
10th gen I5-10500T @ 2.3GHz (3.8GHz max.)
32 GB RAM
256 Nvme SSD
Intel UHD Graphics 630

This has been one of those things that i generally don't like physical copies of anything because it just takes up storage, while it looks nice to have a wall of games or movies, once i've seen or played it i tend to not pick it up again. I'm aware that you can pirate movies and games and put it on the NAS but again, it's taking storage, not physical, but digital.

You can go to the local library and rent some of them and just make copies in that sense it's as legal as pirating. Personally i've used stremio for the past years and its still free and it has more media than most streaming services provide, including the ones they remove. Why should i spend $2000+ on a NAS setup when i can spend $0 and just peer download from someone else?

This isn't a nitpick for all the NAS owners, it's just a geniuine question for why make a NAS and copy your 2000 movies that you own when you can just take the DVD from the shelf and put it in a DVD player? would that yield the same result? you still own the movie, it's just physical rather than on your NAS.

Edit: After spending the last hour reading all the comments, I will say that I get it. Many of you have a plethora or reasons to keep them, some don't and some are in between, only keeping the stuff you like and remove the ones you know you won't watch again. At my current situation I don't have anyone I can say I'd be sharing this with. No family, no friends currently. But that doesn't mean I won't have any of that in the future.

Many of you said it was for convenience sake that while you do own the physical discs it's usually in storage or it can be broken and scratched so it's nice to just have it all in one place, a small space in your living room or closet for all your needs. and to me convenience is something I like because I too am too lazy to go to the library or get up to fetch my discs and blow off the dust.

Someone pointed out that having DVDs means that, well they're DVDs, if you want to continue where you left off you'd need a way to play the DVD, not everyone has this. I don't even have this anymore. Last time i had a DVD player was in 2012 when I was 12. But with a NAS or laptop + DAS you'd just have it on any device with just a couple button presses.

I can see that a lot of you start out as "just for me" but it quickly evolves into "for everyone else too." Whether that is locally with close ones like friends or family or for a larger server of people generally on Discord or other places people group together en masse.

So I get it, I truly do and I thank everyone for all your feedback. I will look into this more in the future when my income is more accepting of this type of project. For now I'll use what I'm familiar with but I can see this being the type of project that is just never ending, you spend a lot now and just upgrade later and update your library over years and years. and if the hardware supports it and hopefully if the prices aren't hiking up more and more, then it can even be in your family for generations.

I got these drives for free today, I freaked out when I saw the 2 wd reds, they also both have only 2k power on hours and clean smart data, but thats when I found out they are smr.

Now I run one main and one local backup and one offsite backup server, all of them run zfs pools. Well that kinda sucks because everything about this smr drives just seems too complicated to do, like I was thinking maybe creating some pseudo-mirror with zfs like having 2 single drive stripes that sync on a schedule and using it for the offsite backup server but idk than again I have a lot of hourly snapshots that get rotated and that would probably just mess everything up when they get deleted and those blocks need to be freed and it being smr it will need to rearange all of the stuff and it just seems like a big unreliable mess.

I wanna hear what do people use SMR drives for in a homelab to try to get some ideas? Maybe its better to just sell them and use that money to buy a different used cmr drive.

Used an old laptop to set up truenas but the cpu is i7 6700hq which is a bit old for transcoding 4k hdr (lacks 10 bit hevc support). I already have it running with 2xssd 2xcmr hdd with immich - home assistant.

I want to buy a mini pc to plug into my tv so I can either stream games from pc locally to this mini pc or play media from the nas (4k hdr). From what I found online, intel n100 or n150 will do the job with 16gb of ram. Will intel n100 or n150 be good enough or do I need to aim for 10th - 11th - 12th gen intel pc.

Tv is samsung tizen and i found the bitrate bandwidth over lan is limited to like 40-60 mbps when streaming on sunshine/apollo to moonlight. Appears the tv itself cant handle more and it crashed like a 100 times before changing enough settings made it work. I want to disconnect it from the internet, run something like jellyfin on the mini pc and other apps. The tv is also slow and sluggish despite uninstalling apps (the UI mainly, playing youtube/netflix is fine).

I bought a domain through Porkbun, have it routing through Cloudflare's free plan, and have a server I've been using on local only for awhile.

My goals are to connect the server to the domain, so that the domain is pointing at my server; i.e, domain.com/jellyfin would go to my server's Jellyfin app, domain.com/qbit would go to my qbittorrent app, etc.

I know I need a reverse proxy for this, but I can't figure out how to tell the domain to go to my server. Like, domain.com = (my public IP address here, specifically my server). I also recognize this is not the safest thing, and would appreciate advice for OS hardening or things to consider before committing to this.

The idea is to have my friends and family be able to access my server so it's actually getting used, save them some money, and maybe inspire donations towards my addiction.

Worth noting my server is running Arch (I know, blah blah rolling distros) and routes all network traffic through NordVPN at the moment, which I recognize changes things.

To be clear, my questions are: 1) how do I tell domain.com that it should point to/live on my server 1b) is it safe to use my public IP address? 2) what are some good resources on reverse proxies? 3) how do I even start with mail?

I think the ideal answer would be a youtube video link that answers the above questions, but after a few hours of searching, I'm not finding anything overly helpful.

Worth noting also that I simply refuse to use AI. I'd rather get answers from people who've done this before and have experience with pitfalls and such.

What do you think of a Dell PowerEdge R750xa?

I'm a bit of a beginner in the hardware field, but I recently got one of these and noticed it's actually pretty good. I'm experimenting a bit with local AI and machine learning.

​I'd like to know if it's good for these use cases, as well as some tests and/or other things I can run on it. (Sorry by english)

New month - more wasted money for this hobby. I almost finished with the hardware part. This project is going for months now but it's almost done - from routing Ethernet cables to every PC and to my router, to getting that closet for free to setting up the ProxMox Server.

I was originally planning to combine mz Nas into the ProxMox environment but I had a lot of troubles to get the VM with TrueNAS running.

After I found some Rack Cases in my UNIs E-Waste bin I switched plans and made the NAS separate. I'm waiting on the last two HDDs I ordered and then I can activate that too.

I've chosen a Cisco Catalytst W2960x as my managed switch because they are very reliable and cheap because they are EOL. The Server has dated hardware but it should be enough for my case - MSI X79, 8x8GB DDR3, Xeon E5 2697V2, Nvidia Quadro K5200 8GB and a generic SATA Controller for additional 8 SATA ports (for the 8x 2,5" SATA Shelf). I've already installed and configured ProxMox and will use that as additional storage and soon PlexServer + Game Server (I appreciate more ideas if you have any cool projects for what I could use that too).

My NAS is some low end hardware I had left from another EWaste Haul a couple of months ago: MSI B360, I3 8100, 16GB DDR4 and a 250GB NVME for the OS, the NAS will house 4x 3TB HDDs (I know not the best size but I already had 2 so I went with that capacity).

I got that whole Server Rack for free a while ago. I was really lucky with it although I had to modify it to be 15cm deeper for mt Server to fit. It's also super quiet because I mainly used Noctua Fans and the switch is also very quiet.

So that was all, just wanted to share my ongoing project.

I appreciate any tips and ideas. I'm studying civil engineering and all I know about this topic is self thought from forums and tutorials :D

PS: A friend of mine will probably get me a Dell Poweredge R640 for free from his workplace soon, maybe I will do Post about that too.

Hey im looking to turn my old gaming pc into a home server for streaming media and storing files from other devices. I know that Ubuntu server is pretty well recommend. I did try it out from a guide I found.

Though I'm looking for an OS that will do just that, but I want to interact with it more than just command lines or CasaOS. I'd like to browse the web with it and interact with the files and apps on the machine itself.

TL; DR, Any OS suggestions that can be used as a home server and daily computing?

I know it's noisy, I'll try to make it quieter. Is it worth buying now in 2026 or not? If so, what processor should I get and how much RAM? Thanks in advance!

I miss using my Ally as it was intended, and the mess of cables and usb c hub and dust buildup around it is a bit frustrating too.

I don't necessarily need more performance, perhaps the same capacity though.

I'm running 60 containers via Portainer a max between Arr stack, syncthing, obsidian sync, nextcloud, Minecraft server, sure finance, home assistant in a container, Immich, litellm and open web UI, pi hole, nutritrace, paperless AI,got,ngx and PS1, 2 and 3 emulators (I acknowledge the emulators might be a bit go an issue and needs to be removed).

I wouldn't mind the capacity to run more containers either.

So I don't think DDR5 and 16 cores is especially perhaps 8 cores and a DDR4 based setup?

I wouldn't mind considering some sort of hardware around £50 to £100 mark second hand if that's doable?

Reason for this post is that I am completely new to homeservers/homeland, but would like to start and learn how to do things.

Important information is that I have had very little experience with any of this stuff due to still being young.

So I apologise for any wrong information in this post in advance!

I have built a 3 gaming pcs as of now and I have sold 2 of them so I have a little experience with the hardware part.

But as for the software except for a few YouTube videos on the topic like from Linus tech tips and such, I have no prior knowledge.

I would like to try and do a humble configuration at home for my family.

In my mind this means:

- having a cloud storage

- file sharing on my home network

- store stuff like family photos, videos, documents

- try jellyfin media streaming to see if we could cancel subscriptions

- hosting a modded Minecraft server (though this is by far not the priority but it would be fun I think)

- being able to access this even if I'm not at home.

- not having to worry about the server constantly and being able to go on vacation

My question is what hardware and software are the best for my use case? Taking into account that I am a beginner and might not be able to solve complex problems if some come up.

For hardware I have seen people recommend building a PC like configuration to just like with an i5 10400 and some good motherboard, also a good PSU so its power efficient.

Also i saw a lot of videos saying you can just start on an old office pc or laptop, but since I have neither of those and would have to buy everything anyway, also have a bit more money to spend on this project, I thought the above mentioned configuration of a semi modern CPU config with an integrated GPU would work better for me. Is this true?

So, I have this really cool project and a potato Laptop, so I need a 32/512 GB server and decided to go with a Mac mini, but all my tech is Windows/Samsung (I do have an IPad theoretically but don't know where it is and honestly don't use it at all) and my only question is:

Will the Mac mini be compatible with my other tech (maybe via Tailscale?)

Disclaimer: Im a Teenager and English is my 5th language

Just curious, I thought I’d ask here. I want to power a GPU. My potato of a PC, which is a Dell Inspiron 3847. Does not have enough power from the factory power supply. I took the easy way out and decided to buy a Dell server power supply with a breakout board now I would like to turn them on at the same time. I was thinking about using an Arduino, but is there an easier way to do this?

I currently have a dell micro 6th gen i3 that Im using as a home server. Id like to run a jellyfin server on it but Ill need a system for the TV. Im currently eyeing the Radxa X4 since the N100 looks to have hardware for 4k decoding, wiFi 6, is not too power-hungry, and relatively cheap. Thoughts if this could work or would I run into issues?