I’m pretty new to self-hosting, and the NAS I’m using right now has been a pain since the moment I bought it. The Synology DS220+ just doesn’t have enough CPU power for my needs, and I’ve recently used up all the disk space I installed, so I’m looking for a new server.
Unfortunately, all the options I’ve found online prioritize storage space over CPU, and I haven’t had much luck finding anything that fits my needs.
Requirements:
CPU: Intel Core i3 or higher, but preferably Core i5
GPU: Not needed
RAM: max 64 GB, min 16 GB
Storage: max 32 TB, min 10 TB
Network: 10 GB SPF+
Price: max 6K CAD, preferred 3K CAD
I’m hoping to run TrueNAS Scale with Plex and Nextcloud installed, and my media library isn’t likely to get larger than 5 TB, so CPU is really the main limiter of my current NAS.
As an example of something almost perfect:
The TrueNAS mini X+ and R varieties would work excellently, but don’t meet the CPU requirement. I wanted to look at the other systems on offer from TrueNAS, but they don’t list out CPU specs for anything more advanced than the Mini line.
Of the Lenovo stuff, since it was one of the few websites with a filterable picker, the ThinkSystem SR630 V2 was the closest of fitting my requirements. It comes short on the CPU, though, and is verging on the price limit too. I also don’t need 12 TB of RAM, or 1.2 PB of storage.
What do you use? Can you recommend any websites I can go to find something that fits my needs better?
If this isn’t the right community to post this, please let me know, and I’ll take it down. I don’t want to cause any trouble, I’m just looking for help. I’m really new to this kinda stuff.
I think this is a fine community, but as a question, is there a reason you aren’t considering building a server? You could fit those requirements into a normal desktop chassis and likely still have some pci slots free for future upgrades.
Mostly, I just don’t know much about hardware in general. I’m sure I could follow a tutorial online on how to put it together, but I don’t know much about what I’d need to buy in the first place.
I’ll look online and see what I can find though, this does seem like what I’m going to have to do to get the specs I want.
To see some ideas of what would work, and I hope you feel free to ask around as you look at things! We all had to learn somehow and once you know what you’re looking for it’s just a small puzzle.
Quick suggestion is to decide on the cpu (I’m partial to amd so I’d pick something ryzen based if you want processing power) first then compatible motherboard, as after those two you should be able to just look at spec sheets and see things like the kind of ram you need case type etc.
Tiny/mini/micro makes up my server environment (and two customs using old cases and replaced parts).
Storage is a 1520+ and the two customs, with the 1515+ for backups I don’t want to lose (syncs to two other locations).
Tiny/mini/micro is the majority of compute tasks, mostly proxmox, LXC’s, and a few VMs.
The little machines have plenty of processing power, usually nvme but I can add it on if needed. Combine it with network storage, and you don’t need anything else imo.
Bonus is they are small and cheap as off lease machines being auctioned off.
Are you looking at Dell/HP/Lenovo’s sites? Don’t do that, those are going to be way overpriced and way overkill. Also most of them are rack servers, not really suited to home use. If anything, you’d want to spec it out as a tower workstation.
Personally I build mine out of parts, and usually used parts. Currently I’m using a little U-NAS NS-410 case, and I replaced all the internals with something better. Total cost was less than $400, I think.
I’m a bit surprised by your budget. For something just running plex and next cloud, you shouldn’t need a 6 or even 3k system. I run my server on found parts, adding up to just $600-$700 dollars including (used) SAS drives. It runs probably a dozen docker containers, a dns server, and homeassistant. I don’t even remember what cpu I have because it was such a small consideration when I was finding parts.
I’d recommend keeping g your synology as a simple Nas (maybe next cloud too, depending on how you’re using it) and then get a second box with whatever you need for plex. Unless you’re transcoding multiple 4k videos at once, your cpu/GPU really don’t need much power. I don’t even have a dedicated GPU in mine, but I’m basically unable to do live 4k transcodes (this is fine for me)
To be fair, the budget isn’t so much a question of “how much I have”, but rather a question of “how long am I willing to save up”
The 3K figure I used in my post was based on the relative price of similar systems I’d found online that “mostly” for the bill of what I was looking for.
Systems that actually had the kind of CPU I was looking for often ran in the range of 7K, which would take me about two to three years to save up for.
And while yes, I was looking in the wrong catagory, as far as I can tell they don’t sell non-NAS systems. I wasn’t able the find a single example of a server designed for CPU tasks until I posted here and was recommended the Minisforum MS-01. Which is, admittedly, overkill in the extreme, but at least I won’t have to upgrade for a long while, and I only have to save up for 3 or 4 months to afford it!
No one has brought up Unraid OS specifically yet. Others have said just build your own machine, and yes absolutely this is the way. And then just slap Unraid on that and you have yourself exactly what you’re looking for. It’s user friendly, as powerful as your wallet can handle, and plenty of room for expandability.
I’m very happy with my ASRock N100 (either m or DC). It has sufficient performance for my needs (proxmox with opnsense, jellyfin and various other services) while using very little power
I bought a used desktop with 4 SATA ports. Has i5 7th gen and currently 5 TB and an 500GB SSD and has max ram of 64GB. I guess the HDD are not included in the price?
I’m not sure what your software requirements are but if you go the DIY route a desktop works. I made the BIOS auto turn on on power restored and have services start on startup so it gives the server feeling.
Bonus is that you can use it as a gaming server and upgrade the components easily for a while depending on the motherboard.
If you don’t need enterprise level hardware and support, I can suggest MinisForum. They released the MS01 fairly recently and I believe it fits your specs.
Yeah, the Minisforum Ms-01 was suggested a lot, and as far as I can tell, its nearly perfect. After reading thtough the comments on this post, I’m planning on buying one or two on a few months.
I’m a bit concerned about the risks associated with having storage and compute on the same device, but I can always get a regular nas for storage later.
If you buy three of them you can set up a Ceph cluster I suppose ahah. That would solve part of your issue of having storage and compute on the same node.
To be fair the Synology lineup is confusing, but if you get the right model - one with a Ryzen processor and support for 32GB memory (officially; they can take more) - then you’ve got yourself a proper little workhorse with low power consumption, a stable, reliable OS, and super easy expansion thanks to the hot-swap drive bays and their Hybrid RAID option. My 8 bay model is running a couple of full-blown VMs and what must be two dozen or so docker containers while barely breaking a sweat. The DS723+ is the equivalent 2 bay model.
For things that need some acceleration like Plex and Immich I’ve added a little N100 box (a Beelink S12 Pro) with Ubuntu Server and another Docker instance, and mounted the NAS storage via SMB. This also sips power even when transcoding 4x Plex streams at once.
All of which is to say you don’t need to do a complex, potentially power hungry and difficult to expand self build to do what you want.
For many reasons I would go used. There are used server vendors which have great machines for a reasonable price. You can of course build your own with that money but if you go used you will have a beast which will likely run for decades still.
I would suggest looking into TiniMiniMicro used PC and let NAS do NAS things.
Try to get a PC with decent number of thread and put as much RAM as it supports.
Install ProxMox on it and go nuts.
Learn Linux TV has a great series of videos on it.
I was wondering if they were doing CPU transcoding in plex instead of using a client that supports direct playback. A few Apple TVs can generally do the trick at a much lower cost and double as YouTube and other streaming services clients.
I personally would recommend this n100 to get a real psu which can add many drives, 6 Sata ports and a standard form factor.
Edit: Also a PCIE Slot to add 10 Gbit Networking Card if dual 2.5gbit is too slow. And if you need more power there is also and i3 n305 variant of these mainboards.
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If you think about what the “S” in “NAS” is you’ll realize why they prioritize storage…
You want a general purpose server.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
[Thread #916 for this sub, first seen 12th Aug 2024, 01:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Good bot.
If this isn’t the right community to post this, please let me know, and I’ll take it down. I don’t want to cause any trouble, I’m just looking for help. I’m really new to this kinda stuff.
I think this is a fine community, but as a question, is there a reason you aren’t considering building a server? You could fit those requirements into a normal desktop chassis and likely still have some pci slots free for future upgrades.
Yep, spec a case to meet the drive needs, then find the motherboard that meets the performance needs.
I’d pick a CPU before the motherboard.
Mostly, I just don’t know much about hardware in general. I’m sure I could follow a tutorial online on how to put it together, but I don’t know much about what I’d need to buy in the first place.
I’ll look online and see what I can find though, this does seem like what I’m going to have to do to get the specs I want.
You should try out https://pcpartpicker.com/
Great tool to spec out a computer and give you an idea of how much it’ll cost you.
Thanks!
You can look at things like
https://www.newegg.com/tools/custom-pc-builder
To see some ideas of what would work, and I hope you feel free to ask around as you look at things! We all had to learn somehow and once you know what you’re looking for it’s just a small puzzle.
Quick suggestion is to decide on the cpu (I’m partial to amd so I’d pick something ryzen based if you want processing power) first then compatible motherboard, as after those two you should be able to just look at spec sheets and see things like the kind of ram you need case type etc.
Thank you, I’ll do just that
Tiny/mini/micro makes up my server environment (and two customs using old cases and replaced parts).
Storage is a 1520+ and the two customs, with the 1515+ for backups I don’t want to lose (syncs to two other locations).
Tiny/mini/micro is the majority of compute tasks, mostly proxmox, LXC’s, and a few VMs.
The little machines have plenty of processing power, usually nvme but I can add it on if needed. Combine it with network storage, and you don’t need anything else imo.
Bonus is they are small and cheap as off lease machines being auctioned off.
Are you looking at Dell/HP/Lenovo’s sites? Don’t do that, those are going to be way overpriced and way overkill. Also most of them are rack servers, not really suited to home use. If anything, you’d want to spec it out as a tower workstation.
Personally I build mine out of parts, and usually used parts. Currently I’m using a little U-NAS NS-410 case, and I replaced all the internals with something better. Total cost was less than $400, I think.
Lots of good suggestions here
I’m a bit surprised by your budget. For something just running plex and next cloud, you shouldn’t need a 6 or even 3k system. I run my server on found parts, adding up to just $600-$700 dollars including (used) SAS drives. It runs probably a dozen docker containers, a dns server, and homeassistant. I don’t even remember what cpu I have because it was such a small consideration when I was finding parts.
I’d recommend keeping g your synology as a simple Nas (maybe next cloud too, depending on how you’re using it) and then get a second box with whatever you need for plex. Unless you’re transcoding multiple 4k videos at once, your cpu/GPU really don’t need much power. I don’t even have a dedicated GPU in mine, but I’m basically unable to do live 4k transcodes (this is fine for me)
To be fair, the budget isn’t so much a question of “how much I have”, but rather a question of “how long am I willing to save up”
The 3K figure I used in my post was based on the relative price of similar systems I’d found online that “mostly” for the bill of what I was looking for.
Systems that actually had the kind of CPU I was looking for often ran in the range of 7K, which would take me about two to three years to save up for.
And while yes, I was looking in the wrong catagory, as far as I can tell they don’t sell non-NAS systems. I wasn’t able the find a single example of a server designed for CPU tasks until I posted here and was recommended the Minisforum MS-01. Which is, admittedly, overkill in the extreme, but at least I won’t have to upgrade for a long while, and I only have to save up for 3 or 4 months to afford it!
No one has brought up Unraid OS specifically yet. Others have said just build your own machine, and yes absolutely this is the way. And then just slap Unraid on that and you have yourself exactly what you’re looking for. It’s user friendly, as powerful as your wallet can handle, and plenty of room for expandability.
TrueNAS if you’re on a budget
I’m very happy with my ASRock N100 (either m or DC). It has sufficient performance for my needs (proxmox with opnsense, jellyfin and various other services) while using very little power
I recommend just getting either:
It doesn’t have to be a “server”.
I bought a used desktop with 4 SATA ports. Has i5 7th gen and currently 5 TB and an 500GB SSD and has max ram of 64GB. I guess the HDD are not included in the price?
I’m not sure what your software requirements are but if you go the DIY route a desktop works. I made the BIOS auto turn on on power restored and have services start on startup so it gives the server feeling.
Bonus is that you can use it as a gaming server and upgrade the components easily for a while depending on the motherboard.
If you don’t need enterprise level hardware and support, I can suggest MinisForum. They released the MS01 fairly recently and I believe it fits your specs.
https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01
Yeah, the Minisforum Ms-01 was suggested a lot, and as far as I can tell, its nearly perfect. After reading thtough the comments on this post, I’m planning on buying one or two on a few months.
I’m a bit concerned about the risks associated with having storage and compute on the same device, but I can always get a regular nas for storage later.
If you buy three of them you can set up a Ceph cluster I suppose ahah. That would solve part of your issue of having storage and compute on the same node.
To be fair the Synology lineup is confusing, but if you get the right model - one with a Ryzen processor and support for 32GB memory (officially; they can take more) - then you’ve got yourself a proper little workhorse with low power consumption, a stable, reliable OS, and super easy expansion thanks to the hot-swap drive bays and their Hybrid RAID option. My 8 bay model is running a couple of full-blown VMs and what must be two dozen or so docker containers while barely breaking a sweat. The DS723+ is the equivalent 2 bay model.
For things that need some acceleration like Plex and Immich I’ve added a little N100 box (a Beelink S12 Pro) with Ubuntu Server and another Docker instance, and mounted the NAS storage via SMB. This also sips power even when transcoding 4x Plex streams at once.
All of which is to say you don’t need to do a complex, potentially power hungry and difficult to expand self build to do what you want.
For many reasons I would go used. There are used server vendors which have great machines for a reasonable price. You can of course build your own with that money but if you go used you will have a beast which will likely run for decades still.
I would suggest looking into TiniMiniMicro used PC and let NAS do NAS things. Try to get a PC with decent number of thread and put as much RAM as it supports. Install ProxMox on it and go nuts. Learn Linux TV has a great series of videos on it.
You say you need an i3 or higher but don’t list anything that necessitates that. What do you need that for? N100 is near-ubiquitous in the space.
What about this guy?
I was wondering if they were doing CPU transcoding in plex instead of using a client that supports direct playback. A few Apple TVs can generally do the trick at a much lower cost and double as YouTube and other streaming services clients.
I personally would recommend this n100 to get a real psu which can add many drives, 6 Sata ports and a standard form factor.
Edit: Also a PCIE Slot to add 10 Gbit Networking Card if dual 2.5gbit is too slow. And if you need more power there is also and i3 n305 variant of these mainboards.
That’s why I asked how many drives they needed. The one in question can support up to 4 NVMe drives and 2 SATA drives simultaneously.
This one comes in i3 as well.
Can’t imagine most people actually need 10 gbit, and that’s a large additional expense.