I need some advice on what hardware to buy for my home setup. I see a lot of posts talking about software, but not so much hardware. I would love to have a box I can buy and start setting up stuff.
A rack seems a bit expensive, my initial budget I feel is reasonable starting out is about $500-$800.
I’ve been looking at mini PCs, what are your thoughts on ASUS PN52? Just throwing that into the post to give a pin point of what I’m looking for.
I’m planning on hosting
- Bitwarden
- Nextcloud
- Plex
- Standard notes
- Lemmy instance
- Web server
- Openresty
And need to be able to upgrade storage etc. for future proofing.
Thankful for all insights, tips, and suggestions!
As someone who has a server rack with multiple servers, I would not recommend them to start with as they use up a ton of electricity. I’d recommend a small form factor computer (or a mid sized tower) to start with, it’ll be marginally less powerful but for what you need it’ll get the job done perfectly fine.
If you have an old desktop laying around, that’s the perfect way to get started. Even if you only have some old parts, that’ll cut down on your initial costs. For anything new I generally recommend looking around at places like https://logicalincrements.com to see what they recommend for CPUs and motherboards at different price points. For hard drives I use https://diskprices.com and also eBay. You generally want motherboards that support 4+ SATA connections or have PCIe slots for an expander in the future.
A lot of people start on used small form factor desktops like the ASUS PS52. Other common ones are the Lenovo M series tiny desktops, Dell Optiplex micro desktops or Intel NUCs. These can sometimes be found used for sub $100 a piece from businesses updating their fleets. They can struggle a bit doing stuff that needs some CPU grunt, like live plex transcoding, but are decent otherwise, especially considering the low power draw. You might want to consider spreading that software demand over two or three of them.
live plex transcoding
If you need this, the most cost-efficient way is probably to get an Intel CPU with an integrated GPU that supports QuickSync (all recent ones do) and pay for the lifetime Plex Pass. In the long run, it’s cheaper than getting a beefier CPU, let alone a dedicated GPU, just for transcoding.
I personally just use an old desktop (4th gen i7, yeah that old) and a NAS (mostly for bulk storage seperated from the server). The device you listed is probably more than enough to handle everything, unless you’re sharing Nextcloud and/or Plex with a bunch of people.
Have you looked into an actual NAS rather than a mini-pc though? It’ll give you more storage upgradeability over a mini-pc, and a quality NAS could probably host everything.
I would also consider buying used, especially first starting out. You can save some money buying a model year or two older hardware for decent savings.
(4th gen i7, yeah that old)
The i7-4770 and -90 hold their own amazingly well a decade later!
I’ve been considering a NAS, but haven’t looked to much into it. Could it be an idea to have both? Do you have any NAS reccomendations?
It absolutely is viable. I do so myself. There’s pros and cons to this.
The cost of hardware is more because you have more pieces, you probably need a decent shelf to hold everything (check the local thrift stores for old home theater stands, they work great), and it may add latency for some things where they interact together.
The hardware modularity of it is really nice though. It’s kinda nice not having to worry about losing all your data if you need to reinstall everything on the server. And it gives you the ability to update in smaller pieces rather than all at once.
That being said, a NAS itself generally isn’t all that good at transcoding Plex. Most entry level NAS’s ($200-$300 range) can only transcode a few streams at a time. However you might not use transcoding all that much anyway if you store media on it in a playable format.
I’ve personally only ever used Synology, and they’re not bad, but they’ve been doing a few anticonsumer practices in more recent years that makes me want to get away from them. They’re really easy to set up though, so it’s not a bad option starting out.
If you’re going to go this route, I’d host Nextcloud on the NAS as well as your Plex media, then mount the share on your server so that your server can do transcoding while you’re NAS does bulk storage. Everything else could be hosted on the server
Considering you’re starting from square one though, it may be better to just buy a beefier NAS, and then get a server as your needs expand. Especially if you don’t plan on sharing Plex or Nextcloud with a bunch of people outside your home at this time.
Thanks for the detailed response! I’ve looked around a bit, and a Synology DS220+ seems like a good starter. Knowing I have the ability to move comoutation to a server later on and keep using the NAS for storage makes it seem like a great setup for me
I assume you’re not really experienced with storage servers? Then I would likely recommend a Synology NAS. They give you great software that you can easily configure without the need of deeper knowledge of the inner workings. I started with a Synology and didn’t regret it. It just worked and gave me reliable storage so I could concentrate on the other parts of my homelab. It comes with a price though and you mostly pay for the software.
If you aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty or prefer to use an open source storage solution from the beginning, you might consider Unraid or TrueNAS. The latter is more “enterprisey”, the former seems to be more beginner friendly (but I haven’t used it personally).
Just an idea. You could try hosting and using these apps on a VPS from a cloud provider to find out what your needs are.
I upgraded my gaming machine and used my old motherboard and cpu and loaded unraid on there, the i7 was great for plex transcoding and eventually i ran out of sata ports on my machine so I stuck a sata expander card in my one pcie slot, luckily the motherboard had two m.2 slots so I used that for cache. the case I used was a node304 and over time I added drives as I was running out of space. eventually I build a separate JBOD chassis to hold more drives
