Home Server/Media PC Build

[LoneStarfish]

Budget (including currency): ~$1000

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Storage server for backups, Hosting 3D print server (currently running fluiddpi), Occasional media streaming

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):

 

I'm thinking about building a home server to store file backups, run my 3D print server, have connected to my TV for occasional media streaming, and generally be a test bed I can use to play with home networking setups. In the future I'll likely want to use it to host a VPN and run home automation. My current thinking is to get a Ryzen 5600G as the integrated graphics should be plenty good for what I want to do and the multithreaded performance would be decent for running docker containers for the tasks I want it to do as well as a usable Linux or Windows VM for the media pc side of things. I don't really need that much storage, but I figure if I'm going to build a home server I ought to improve my backup situation. Two terabytes or maybe even less with room for future expansion would be my target there. Read/write speed would be more important to me because I'll probably want to work directly off of it in addition to the backups for some larger projects. The only other big target for the build I can think of is having it be fairly small (Fractal Core 500 caught my eye but seems to be difficult to get), which of course will be a tradeoff with the room for expansion. Depending on how bored I get this summer I may try to wait for next gen ryzen to come out and drop prices or get an upgrade, but we'll see.

 

To recap my current thoughts in a less word vomit format:

CPU: Ryzen 5600G

RAM: 16 GB DDR4-3600

OS: TrueNAS Scale

 

[LIGISTX]

39 minutes ago, LoneStarfish said:

Budget (including currency): ~$1000

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Storage server for backups, Hosting 3D print server (currently running fluiddpi), Occasional media streaming

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):

 

I'm thinking about building a home server to store file backups, run my 3D print server, have connected to my TV for occasional media streaming, and generally be a test bed I can use to play with home networking setups. In the future I'll likely want to use it to host a VPN and run home automation. My current thinking is to get a Ryzen 5600G as the integrated graphics should be plenty good for what I want to do and the multithreaded performance would be decent for running docker containers for the tasks I want it to do as well as a usable Linux or Windows VM for the media pc side of things. I don't really need that much storage, but I figure if I'm going to build a home server I ought to improve my backup situation. Two terabytes or maybe even less with room for future expansion would be my target there. Read/write speed would be more important to me because I'll probably want to work directly off of it in addition to the backups for some larger projects. The only other big target for the build I can think of is having it be fairly small (Fractal Core 500 caught my eye but seems to be difficult to get), which of course will be a tradeoff with the room for expansion. Depending on how bored I get this summer I may try to wait for next gen ryzen to come out and drop prices or get an upgrade, but we'll see.

 

To recap my current thoughts in a less word vomit format:

CPU: Ryzen 5600G

RAM: 16 GB DDR4-3600

OS: TrueNAS Scale

 

I probably wouldn’t run truenas for this. I would look at using proxmox as a hypervisor (potentially? It would give you the most flexibility), and it can be used directly as a simple NAS since it’s just Debian, you can instal harddrives and use them as SMB locations. If you wanted, you could run truenas as a VM under it, I do this, lots of videos on how. 
 

Then you can host other VM’s, like home assistant for automation and whatever other things you would like. 
 

Take the time to research proxmox and see if it fits your needs. 

[LoneStarfish]

On 5/28/2022 at 5:53 PM, LIGISTX said:

I probably wouldn’t run truenas for this. I would look at using proxmox as a hypervisor (potentially? It would give you the most flexibility), and it can be used directly as a simple NAS since it’s just Debian, you can instal harddrives and use them as SMB locations. If you wanted, you could run truenas as a VM under it, I do this, lots of videos on how. 
 

Then you can host other VM’s, like home assistant for automation and whatever other things you would like. 
 

Take the time to research proxmox and see if it fits your needs. 

I'm not very familiar with proxmox so I'll do some research into it. If you don't mind me asking, what are your biggest reasons for running it with truenas underneath as opposed to just running truenas natively? I know you mentioned more flexibility but so far from what I've read on both solutions I'm not sure I can tell much benefit there since truenas itself will allow running VMs.

[LIGISTX]

8 minutes ago, LoneStarfish said:

I'm not very familiar with proxmox so I'll do some research into it. If you don't mind me asking, what are your biggest reasons for running it with truenas underneath as opposed to just running truenas natively? I know you mentioned more flexibility but so far from what I've read on both solutions I'm not sure I can tell much benefit there since truenas itself will allow running VMs.

Truenas scale will allow for VM's, but its a very new product that they are still working the bugs out of... but more importantly truenas is a NAS appliance, its not really "meant" to be a hypervisor. I know with Scale, they are trying to go that direction and market it as such, but things like Proxmox and ESXi are purpose built just for this, and have decades of support and tuning to do just that exact task.

 

Also, truenas (due to the ZFS file system which it is based on and why it is so good at keeping data safe), is not really set up for easy expansion down the line. ZFS assumes you fully populate it with the intended amount of storage from the start. ZFS has pools, which consist of vdevs, which consists of multiple drives. ZFS is good at securing your data based on data redundancy and spreading that data out over many drives. But each vdev requires its own redundancy scheme, so if you buy say 2 drives now and do a mirrored array (exact clone), or say 3 drives and do z1 (single drive for parity), if you want to add more space later, you will need to build an entire new vdev with new drives, and that vdev will need its own parity. So the "intended" use is to build out an array you know will be enough from the start, thus why I run 10x4 tb drives in Z2... if I ever wanted more space, I have two options, build another vdev (which would be hard because I would need a server chassis that supports more then the 11 drives I currently have), or would need to replace each drive, one by one with larger capacity, and once all drives are swapped out for larger drives I would have the full capacity of the new larger drives.

 

If you ran something like proxmox, you can add a single drive and just create a SMB mount point to share data across your network (same as you could do with ubuntu, or a r-pi if you want to start googling this), but you wouldn't get the nice data integrity features that ZFS provides (ZFS does also do checksumming and scrubbing, so it will actively look for corruption and fix it.... if it has parity discs to fix it with. If you only give ZFS a single disc for instance, it will do a scrub, find an error and tell you it found an error, and tell you it can't fix it).

 

Hopefully this info helps, and don't take it as me saying don't go with truenas, either bare metal or under proxmox. I am a HUGE proponent of ZFS, but just make sure you understand how it works and what its doing before you go down that rabbit hole. It isn't difficult to learn, and the truenas forums has a wealth of information to try and learn this stuff. If you go ZFS, make sure to build an array that makes sense from the start, like either a mirrored pair, or if you want more space, maybe 3 drives in Z1. Performance will be plenty fine for data backup and SMB network shares, but I would get a SSD to boot off of (you need a boot drive regardless if you go proxmox or truenas, with truenas you CAN'T run the OS off the array, and in proxmox you could set up an SMB share with the boot drives space, but it just isn't really "advised" when SSD's are as cheap as they are). Get a 250 or 500 GB SSD for boot, and run your array on a couple of harddrives as mentioned before. Your VM's would also live on the SSD which is much, much better. Having multiple OS's hit harddrives is just not a fun time... 

 

Again, I know I am throwing a lot at you here, but don't take that to be a reason to just be a deer in the headlights. Do research and start somewhere - almost no matter where and how you start... it will be wrong :). But that is the fun of homelab, as you grow and learn, you start to tweak things and try different setups as you understand your needs more and understand how to better make the system meet them. Originally I was in the same boat, I ran freenas bare metal and used its build int (really bad) VM implementation but it was clunky and bad. Then I went to ESXi with an ubuntu VM and freenas VM, now I run a pretty full on homelab under proxmox, many VM's, home assistant, pfsense, truenas, etc etc. Truenas Scale will work better then OG freenas did for VM's and such, but, imo just going with Proxmox from the start sets you up better to be "at the final form" of your homelab from the start. Truenas Scale may be what you need, but it may not, its still so new to the scene its hard to say. But I CAN say, proxmox can do it all, and it is the homelab hypervisor of choice because its free to use, and has a proven track record for home users and in enterprise (same reason your looking at truenas - its the proven home and enterprise storage appliance, which also thankfully has a free to use for home users channel).

 

Happy homelabbing