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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] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I would recommend:

go on eBay and find some sort of cheap Lenovo/dell/hp thin client for your secondary node. You can find workable 1L-class boxes for around $100. You can get away with some of the older m700/710/900/910 tiny models, but the extensibility of the m720/920 tiny models is going to be much better.
for your primary, I think you’d probably be best off finding an old server tower with 8 3.5” bays - if you’re lucky and on-the-ball, you may be able to snipe something like this, but shipping is of course going to be a bitch. An alternative is to pick up another one of those thin clients (making sure it’s a model with USB3, but preferably 3.1 or 3.2 whatever the gen is (side note: fuck anyone involved with the USB versioning scheme, because it’s absolutely indecipherable) that can actually support meaningful data transfer, and then just find a cheap DAS and connect it to that node.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Thank you very much! Can you elaborate on why m720/920 have a better extensibilty? And what would be a resonable data transfer rate for a DAS?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

They support NVMe and have a PCIE riser; if you get the little adapter from Lenovo’s proprietary slot to standard PCIE, you can run it as a nic, or get an HBA with external SFF-8008 ports and then find a cheap enclosure to use as a custom DAS solution.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Hello, sorry to bother again but I have a question. Do you think adding a M.2 card with six SATA3 connectors to a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q would work? I found a M910q for 50 bucks, quite cheap I'd say and the expansion card is around 30 bucks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No, for 2 reasons:

You will have better luck with a full-fledged PCIE HBA from ebay
that won’t fit with how the chassis is designed (at least on the “tiny” model - I’ve no experience with the larger SFF model). It’s on the underside too, so just leaving part of the cover off is not an option.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Thank you very much, you saved me money and hassle!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

No worries. Cheers, and good luck finding a system to suit your needs!