Hi,

I am looking for building a NAS with used hardware, mostly for media, because my current Dell 7050 only has a 500gb hdd and I am tired of running low on space constantly.

I have a few questions:

  • I am currently running containers for Jellyfin, Radarr and Sonarr, if I buy a new machine for NAS, it makes sense to migrate every media-related container to the NAS drive, correct? The Dell machine I have has a 7th gen Intel CPU, that is able to transcode H265 perfectly, which is a big bonus. So if I end up moving it, the machine I buy needs to do the same, I suppose.
  • If so, then I guess using TrueNAS is not the way to go, and instead use a simple debian or ubuntu server distro for simple sharing?
  • If TrueNAS is the answer, then I should aim for ECC ram. If that’s the case, I am not aware of cheap/budget workstations that have ECC ram, but if you have recommendations for one, great;
  • If you think I should instead buy something with an i3/i5/i7 or Ryzen processor, what kind of machines would you recommend?
  • I was looking to find something for around 150/200€, excluding hard drives. Not sure if that is possible.

Thank you.

  • fartsparkles
    2·
    1 year ago

    You can find cheap server chassis in my country for €100 for 2U/3U/4U with plenty of bays since it’s ultimately just a case. There’s plenty of space for any board in the case and you can get mount adapters for desktop boards to mount in server cases. Personally I’d build a bare metal Arch Linux host and run everything as Docker containers running on ZFS RAID-Z but TrueNAS etc is fine if you’re not familiar with building the host yourself. Arch has great documentation for every kind of service you’d want to run on the host.

    • utubas@lemm.eeOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      As of right now, I live in a small studio, so noise is an important factor, forgot to mention that. I thought about server chassis but for them to be cheap enough, they will also be expensive and power hungry. So I was leaning more towards tower builds.