Thanks to this community I’ve learned and I’m feeling inspired. I’ve loved having an NAS for the last few years, but it’s woefully under powered for what I’m using it for these days.
So I’ve ordered some basic PC parts, gonna build a basic setup using an old CPU I got lying about and try the NAS OS I saw talked about on here recently.
TrueNAS looks like a good option with only slight fears it’ll go down the well known path to the dark side like so many free options before.
In any event, I’m looking forward to adding Nextcloud and Jellyfin, to trying out Docker and generally having more control over things.
Thanks again to you all for informing and inspiring.
I’ll be back if I get questions!
Consider that a new power efficient CPU may be cheaper by consuming less electricity over a few years!
I hadn’t considered that! Thank you.
I’m hoping the OS, as it’s designed for this, is going to be helpful in getting the right balance with power usage.
This is why I’m using a refurbished mini PC as my home server. Lower wattage for constant uptime at home. Also very quiet.
Bingo! I’ve got 4 mini-PCs (does a 2014 Mac mini count?), and one SFF. The average power draw of this cluster is barely ~90W.
Screenshot from my HASS dashboard:
Yeah with that win10 EOL there’s loads of refurbs out there for cheap.
Only one of them is compatible with Windows 11 lmao - HP Elite G4 mini with an i7-8700T. Everything else is 7th gen or 4th gen.
You can calculate it !
Take your power usage and compute the cost over a year.
I will soon add a SSD because i finally moved from a RAID 1 to RAID 5 (so more HDDs), it consume more electricity.
I can measure how much power it draw because the server is on a smart plug. I calculated an additional 20-30€ a year of electricity, adding a SSD for read/write cache would allow the HDDs to stop spinning, make things faster and will be cost effective over a few years.