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Help for getting started with hardware (lemmy.today)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

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I dived into the selfhosting rabbit hole once again and again I am stuck at the hardware part. I'd like to start small-ish to make it realisable. I thought about a NAS (Openmediavault probably). First I wanted to do it on a Raspberry Pi with an external hard-drive but then I read USB connected drives are unreliable and so on. Mini PCs are too small to house internal drives so should I go with a (refurbished) business PC from ebay and add some drives to it?But they usually come with Windows 10, which I wouldn't need but makes them more expensive. I also have at least one old PC case laying around but no mainboard or CPU for it, if that info might be important. Thank you in advance for helping a noob out!

Edit: What I want to achieve: I would like a NAS and (separated) a server with some small services (pi-hole or adguard, syncthing, jellyfin (getting the data from the NAS), and so on). I thought about running the small services with docker on a RPi 4 and the NAS on a refurbished business PC with SATA drives in the case (I checked ebay and there are mainboards with 4 SATA III connectors and PCI so I could even add more SATA connectors). In a second moment a backup server (maybe with borg) would be a good idea but I could also do manual backups with an external USB HDD for the time being.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

@tal has already given a really good answer. To add to it, this thread might help you some: https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/11963996 I was asked what I thought was "better" than a raspberry pi. Came back with an eBay search and a trio of suggestions in the price range of a Pi 4. TLDR is whatever you have currently will probably work fine but if you need to buy hardware, there are plenty of low cost options. And of course, Pi's also work fine for anything they are capable of, which is most things.

When I started self hosting, Raspberry Pi's were the cheapest option available. I learned fairly quickly that the SD card was the weakest part of them but not long after the Pi3 came out we were able to boot off of USB drives which solved that issue. I think I had 8 SSDs hanging off of one pi before I finally decided to plop down the money for a tower. I then added a pair of 6 port SATA cards and added even more storage to that system. Eventually I was hosting so many things that I was running out of RAM, So I bought a second used tower, this one with a much newer processor and a lot more RAM. Now I run both with the old system running as a NAS and the new system hosting my other services. I wouldn't stress about hardware too much. Hardware can grow with you, to a point.

Mini PCs are too small to house internal drives

Most mini PCs I've heard of (and quite a few thin clients) use m.2 drives for internal storage. Not difficult to upgrade. I've also heard of a few that had ports and internal space for 2.5 inch SSDs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

The link you posted is not working for me but doesn't matter. Thank you very much for the writeup!

I found a few of these on ebay, refurbished business machines mostly. I think you can fit a drive or two inside there? The mainboards have SATA connectors. Maybe I could also take the mainboard and power supply out and put them in my old tower.

Another thing I thought about was buying a mini pc, put it in my old tower, add a M.2 6xSATA card and put the drives in the bays of the tower.

But probably I should just use my RPi400, hook up one or two big external HDDs (add RAID?) and start there. Then I can better decide what I want and need after testing Openmediavault for example. While talking about the RPi and booting from USB drives. Should I buy a cheap-ish USB SSD and boot from that and not from the SD card? What's the problem with SD cards?