Technology

Assembled a server with Supermicro X9DRL-IF board and an old case. I figured I wanted ecc to safeguard against corruption on top of using btrfs. Harvested old laptop drives to build out a decent sized storage array for my purposes. Rationale overall was: cheaper to assemble than a purpose built NAS that had ecc and moderate compute power, more storage expansion options.

99% of the function has been serving samba/sftp shares. Started using nextcloud w/ memories to sync and tag photos from mobile. Standardized everything I run to opensuse tumbleweed/microOS.

I used to have a NAS, ended up moving towards a mini server instead. The flexibility has been really worth it for me, and I run a JBOD enclosure for extra disks so that I can handle backups and media files.

I'm running an ASRock Deskmini. It has a variety of flaws, but it works surprisingly well and has been basically stable. It's tiny, and it can get a decent heatsink and fan upgrade on top. I'm running a Ryzen CPU in it. It runs all of my self-hosting stuff.

TrueNAS virtualized under Proxmox with HBA card passed through. I don't run apps on my NAS, it's just for storage.

I just have a Synology with 4 drives. Super basic and was very easy to set up and takes up very little space in a closet. I mount it to my Ubuntu server using samba, and then any data processing that needs to be done on that data (e.g. plex, music server, etc.) is done on the server, which is much more powerful than the little Celeron CPU that the Synology has.

I have an Ubuntu VM running on my Proxmox server. It just exports some folders over NFS that I mount from my laptops and PC. Then I have Nextcloud running in a separate VM so my phone can upload photos. The NC storage is all the NFS mounted folders from the NAS. Simple and works.

I have a Synology DS 918+. I run just their apps for photos, surveillance station & as file sever. Separately I run promox on Intel NUC for services need more resources than the NAS has such as Plex (with transcoding), home assistant & another AI like NVR called frigate (with TPU). Overall it’s a good low power & stable setup but the fan on NUC can be annoyingly loud at times.