Need Help - I would like to swap my current NAS to a Home Server/Lab

liunet · February 4

Hello, I currently have a Synology DS220j with 2x2TB (Raid 1) for the following purposes:

Data Backup (SMB/Synology Drive)
Phone Photos Backup (Synology Photos)
Plex

I am currently running into many performance issues, DSM apps run slow (Synology Photos for example) and Plex can't perform any transcoding.

I want to upgrade my current setup to run the following services:

NAS (TrueNAS/OMV/Unraid).
Drive-like Software (like Nextcloud files). To eventually share files with my friends or between my devices.
Photoprism. To back up my photos and videos from my phone and my family.
Media Server (Plex or Jellyfin). I would like to perform well on the transcoding of 4K media.
Radarr/Sonarr. An automatic media download service to feed my media server.
Adblocker (Pi-hole). An instance of Pi-hole for my local network.
VPN (Wireguard)
Hypervisor. Proxmox to deploy some personal projects/containers. (Mostly lightweight projects, not a primary goal)
Any monitoring service to review that everything is running smoothly.

I was thinking of keeping the amount of drives between 2 and 4, but I believe that I could live with 2 without any problem.

One of the builds that seems to be quite budget-friendly is an HP EliteDesk or ProDesk SFF with an i5 6th gen and 8GB of RAM (+plug my current drives, which are 2 Seagate IronWolf 2TB 5900rpm).

Also, I currently have a Ryzen 5 2600 + B450M Bazooka in my current setup which I could consider upgrading to a 5800x and keep for the home server.

I really wouldn't like to invest much money in it (budget friendly <3), but I'd like to hear opinions because I don't want to get a build that might reach Its limit quite fast.

What do you recommend me? An old corporate PC (such as the EliteDesk SFF series) or a "built from scratch" configuration (Aliexpress build such as the x79 maybe, refurbish my old Ryzen,...)?
Based on your response to the previous question, what specs?

Thanks in advance!!

voyager_ · February 5

I would go custom build, running unraid or truenas. Both will run what your asking, I am partial for unraid but I also am slightly biased. I have two unraid servers that have been going for years. The big reason I went and stayed unraid was for the "unraid part" you can easily add drives down the road. Keep in mind with way you go one drive will go towards backup. In unraid it would be your parity drive, this drive needs to be either bigger or equal to your larger drive. If you can try and get an 8tb for your parity drive now, this way down the road you won't be limited by those 2tbs without having to deal with changing out that drive and letting it rebuild.

As far as hardware goes that ryzen 2600 should be fine and the nice thing about am4 is you can easily swap it out down the road. I ran a 2600x for years and had it running plex, home assistant, windows vm for downloads, etc... For plex I would look at getting a used quadro, I have been using a k2200 that I picked up for $100 a couple of years ago for transcoding. (You do need plex pass to transcode). If you do go prebuilt or an intel platform try and get one with quick sync for transcoding. The main reason I would go custom is to make future upgrades or expansion easier.

liunet · February 5

6 hours ago, voyager_ said:

I would go custom build, running unraid or truenas. Both will run what your asking, I am partial for unraid but I also am slightly biased. I have two unraid servers that have been going for years. The big reason I went and stayed unraid was for the "unraid part" you can easily add drives down the road. Keep in mind with way you go one drive will go towards backup. In unraid it would be your parity drive, this drive needs to be either bigger or equal to your larger drive. If you can try and get an 8tb for your parity drive now, this way down the road you won't be limited by those 2tbs without having to deal with changing out that drive and letting it rebuild.

As far as hardware goes that ryzen 2600 should be fine and the nice thing about am4 is you can easily swap it out down the road. I ran a 2600x for years and had it running plex, home assistant, windows vm for downloads, etc... For plex I would look at getting a used quadro, I have been using a k2200 that I picked up for $100 a couple of years ago for transcoding. (You do need plex pass to transcode). If you do go prebuilt or an intel platform try and get one with quick sync for transcoding. The main reason I would go custom is to make future upgrades or expansion easier.

Hello, I don't think that I'll struggle with storage capacity. I feel that 2TB is enough for me, not much of a data hoarder.

So, maybe I don't need Unraid? (Considering It's a paid software and not planning to upgrade capacity soon)

Also, I have found a HP EliteDesk 800 G2 SFF with an i7-6700, 8GB of RAM for 100€ (Living in Europe).

Do you think that It will match the build I am looking for? Maybe expanding the memory to 16GB or 32GB.

The case has 2 HDD slots so I'll put both drives I currently have into it.

The CPU has Quick Sync so It's good for transcoding aswell (?), my only concern is Its performance for the things I'm planning to do.

Bersella AI · February 6

I have a similar setup built from a used HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF chassis with a Pentium G4600 processor & 8 GB of memory, which runs most of these services flawlessly, except being a supervisor -- never planned for virtualization. In the latest TrueNAS Scale, most of these services can be established via TrueCharts, while Docker can be manually installed for even more apps. Unraid would make these much easier to handle.

G2 should also work fine here, although the integrated GPU (HD 530) may be inferior to that in G4600 (i.e. HD 630) in regard of transcoding. You may refer to this webpage for more comparisons.

On the other hand, since no integrated GPU exists in Ryzen 2600, an additional GPU starting from GTX 1050/Quadro P400 would be required for hard transcoding. The processor itself has adequate power for soft transcoding, though, outperforming i7-6700 undoubtedly, and with much more room for future upgrades.