Hi!
I have an old gaming pc (i5 9400F) with 16gb of ram that has been acting as my home server with proxmox. It’s quite large and quite loud and very overpowered for what I’m using it for (home assistant, Minecraft server, some lxc containers) and a mini pc (amd 5800h with 16gb ram).
I want to sell my gaming pc, place the HDD into a NAS (and samba share my plex library), and potentially grab a low powered N100 minipc to pick up the lxc containers and home assistant that my gaming pc is running.
New to self hosting so wondering if this is a good setup or if there are any glaring issues you see with this. What is your setup?
N100 ain’t it.
Maybe i3-N305… or a mini PC with AMD H-series chip (or similar) configured TDP-down if you are concerned about power usage or fan noise.
The n100 will make you sad eventually as your self-hosting addiction soars.
An older i5 with onboard gpu or an nvidia card will make you happier and not pull THAT much wattage.
Your Minecraft server will thank you.
I currently have a mini pc with amd 5800h. My thought was an n100 pc would take care of Pihole, Homarr, and other low cpu demand services. Minecraft server would go on my 5800h mini
Not a bad idea, but I’ll warn you that the addiction for homelabs is strong.
Depends on what you’re doing.
If you want a low-power setup, get a shell with a backplane for 4 drives and an n100 board.
If you want to host games, get an AMD APU on a mini-itx and do the same.
Maybe a 20-40W difference, but the AMD is going to outperform the n100 like a hot knife through butter.
I agree with this, but would like to add for OP that diversifying is not always a bad idea.
I have a NAS that is mainly running as just a NAS with a few containers to help me download and categorize stuff. It has a AMD CPU, so no HW transcoding, so I added a N100 to host Jellyfin on the side. That little NUC can also run HA, Heimdall, PiHole, Tailscale or any lightweight container with ease. I do it with Proxmox LXC’s.
If I wanted to host game servers, I would probably build a server for that on its own anyways, just because it would be more power hungry and need modularity for future upgrades/changes.
I guess the point is that there is no «one server does it all» for me. I prefer to have servers more suitable for their tasks than having one beast doing everything alone. Makes it suck less when stuff breaks too.
Otherwise I think the comment above is on point.
Do you already have a NAS? You could go back to your original setup, but with a more efficient CPU and run it all on one box.
N100 devices are neat, but those CPUs are really slow. Running the rest of the computer, plus the inefficiency of the power brick does add up to the power usage/heat output. Consolidating into one efficiently tuned device can save a lot of power.
Aliexpress has some funky boards which are laptop CPUs soldered to an mATX motherboard, if you can find a nicely sized case you could maintain that all in one formfactor, but with the efficiency of a laptop. I have no experience with them, but they look cool and should do what you need. They’re essentially your mini pc but as an ATX board so you have expandability.
Yeah, I’ve been looking for a replacement for my NAS, which is currently my old PC (Ryzen 1700 w/ mATX board). But everything I’ve found either has poor performance (e.g. N100 devices), poor expandability (e.g. mini-PCs), or are way too expensive. So I stick w/ my ghetto NAS box for now.
I’d really love a smaller footprint, but I really don’t want to spend more than a couple hundred on it. I’ve upgraded our (SO and I) computers to mini-ITX, so I’ll probably end up upgrading the NAS once we upgrade one of our PCs. That way I’ll just need a case and maybe a PSU and I’m off to the races.
But if anyone has found any diamonds in the rough that are small, support at least 2 HDDs and 1 SSD (can be NVMe) for pretty cheap, I’m interested. I’d prefer 4 HDDs so I have an upgrade route, but in all honesty, I’ll probably end up replacing both HDDs instead of adding a second RAID.
Take a look at the “AOOSTAR WTR PRO AMD Ryzen 7 5825u 4 Bay Nas Mini PC”
AOOSTAR WTR PRO AMD Ryzen 7 5825u 4 Bay Nas Mini PC
Huh, I’ve never heard of them, that looks like a pretty cool box!
The main issue I see is no PCIe slot. My current NAS runs over Wi-Fi (I know, I should run cable to it), so I would need to put this next to my router, which is in my bedroom. And even though it’s pretty quite, I don’t want to hear that all night. A minor issue is that it uses laptop RAM, so I probably can’t reuse the modules in something else.
That said, definitely a cool find, thanks!
There’s a decent supply of not humongous mATX cases with decent drive options. I found the JONSBO N4 which looked neat, but then saw this reddit thread saying it’s kinda poopy (but see the top comment for a fix). But fancy features like hot swap bays make them pretty expensive. If you don’t want hot swap there’s a ton of mATX cases with 4 drive bays that just aren’t marked as anything special. Cases with power supply basements tend to hide at least 2 drives down there. Or there’s the classic drives in the front and you can fit a ton of 3.5" drives up front in an mATX or even ITX formfactor.
If you’re planning on upgrading I’d highly suggest getting a case with at least 1 more free HDD bay. Replacing a drive in ZFS is a LOT quicker than resilvering a drive. I just did that the other day and I actually thought it was broken it went so quickly.
JONSBO N4
The N2 and N3 also look pretty neat, but they’re mini-ITX, so I’d need to either buy a new mobo or wait until I upgrade one of our SFX PCs.
My current NAS box is way too big, since it’s basically a full tower and I only have one GPU and 3 drives in there, so 80% of the space is completely wasted. It’s also idle most of the time and never does anything intense, so it’s not like I need the cooling either.
I’d highly suggest getting a case with at least 1 more free HDD bay
Good call. I currently only have 2, and I was shopping for a 4-bay so I could run a second mirror pair, but getting 5 makes a lot of sense to replace a failing drive w/o yanking it out (maybe it’ll function well enough to help copy to the new drive).
funky boards which are laptop CPUs soldered to an mATX motherboard.
Expandability
Aren’t those mutual exclusive? Or is there a specific reason why they are directly soldered to the mainboard?
Soldered to a desktop motherboard, so you have pci express expandability. Throw in an HBA and you’ve got like total 12 data ports. Plus two ram slots for 96 gigs of ram (or more maybe?).
Changing the CPU is more upgradability. But there’s no point in upgrading when the only upgrade is an i7 to i9 with 0.2ghz faster speeds and worse efficiency.
Seems fine. I have an affordable NAS that mostly serves files and has a few containers, and a second server using one the Lenovo Tiny machines that has many more services and a lot more RAM. And it works well.
