homelab upgrade recommendations

Well if you want a proper upgrade, 40TB plus redundancy and space for a GPU, I'd say you don't want a mimi PC but a full-blown one. I built my server myself from components. It's hard to find good numbers on power consumption and that was one of my main concerns. I had a look at some PC magazines and what kind of mainboards they recommend for a home server. Figured I wanted 6 SATA ports and I started from that. Unfortunately said magazine doesn't have a good article right now, so I don't know what to recommend. Another way is to look for refurbished PCs. If they're some brand like Lenovo or Dell, you'll find the specs online. With a N100 mini pc, I'm not so sure if that's a big step up from your current setup... I don't think they have more internal harddrive ports or slots for GPUs than your current laptop.

I built a server a few years ago in a Fractal Design Node (big square box) which has 4 6TB drives in raid 5 for 18TB of storage and a 6 core AMD cpu. It cost around £1200 and half of that was the hard drives.

It's been really good, so if you're looking to build one yourself I'd recommend having a look at the case and the price of drives.

Best bang for your buck is business workstations. $1000 is a fairly big budget and is likely a but overkill. Get 3 decently speced workstations and put storage and fast networking in them. Cluster them and then setup high availability. Depending on your setup you could also modify one to also be a NAS. Get a sata or SAS card and put some drives in the chassis. You may need to get dirty but that's the fun part.

I have a Synology. I love it, but if you’re on a budget build one server and use that for storage and hosting all your stuff.

Use PCPartsPicker and build yourself a full desktop tower. Something like https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gHLHxg. You can get a lot for your money on the used market, but it will use way more power and will be slower.

For above build I picked lower to mid range components, but you can see what matters to you most. Maybe get a CPU with more cores and less storage to start and add more storage later. Or do the opposite if you don’t care about CPU but want more storage now.

Some hardware notes, do get AMD CPU and stay away from Intel. Last 2 years of their CPUs are plagued with major issues. Do also get DDR5 ram and whatever motherboard supports that. Get a fast NVMe for your OS drive. 1Tb should be plenty.

Finally don’t install Ubuntu on it. Two options for OS: if you want to use it as a nas then use TrueNAS Scale otherwise use ProxMox. Then you can create a virtual machine on either one of those and install Ubuntu on that if you still want to. You can also run containers on both of those.

I think the N100 type CPUs are limited on PCIe lanes. You end up with less nvme, less sata, and usually no slots.

You can find x570 am4 boards for less than $100 now. Two nvme, 8 sata, 2 big slots and 2 small.

But all of that flexibility and expandability is going to cost you in power. My 7700x w/A380, 3 hdd is 125 watts 24/7. $10 a month on my power bill. I think those n100 mini PCs only have a 35w brick and idle at less than 15w.

I got a terramaster nas and I'm super happy https://www.terra-master.com/global/f4-5067.html

The main reason to choose it is that it is just a PC in the form factor of a NAS. You can just boot it from a pendrive and install your favourite operating system. I had a Qnap before, and while it was great to start, self hosting wasn't the best experience on their OS.

this is a small form factor, it should be low power consumption (I've never measured to confirm it) and supports both nvme and sata drives. Currently I've an nvme for the OS and two sata for storage. CPU is powerful enough to run home assistant, vpn, pihole, commafeed, and a bunch of other Docker images. I just plan to increase the ram soonish because the stock feels a little constrained.

I purchased a case, SilverStone Technology CS382 8-Bay. Around $200-225.

Bought used parts off eBay:

Asus P8Z77-M LGA 1155 DDR3 SDRAM Desktop Motherboard $75

32GB DDR3 1333 $35

LSI 6Gbps SAS HBA 9200-81 IT Mode P20 $35

Nvidia Quadro P620 2GB GDDR5 4x mini DisplayPort $70

I have six 12tb drives (seagate exos), purchased refurb from serverpartdeals.com and had great luck with them and their support. I found that on Reddit data hoarder sub.

I run Truenas. 4 drives for primary. 2 drives for backup of the first 4. And I have a qnap 4 bay dumb raid box for a third backup with old drives I had. My paranoia but not related really to the nas.

Anyway it's possible and I enjoy what I built. Also that case is loud, get a fan controller too.

One of the best choice is an old entreprise tower factor server, but it has some downside, it's a bit power hungry, do not work if you can't support the noise at all (tower factors are not loud but not silent either). The positive is that it's really cheap his power (got mine 120$ for 3To, 12vcores, and 32 ddr4 ram).

EDIT : buy some used HDD, easily getting 20tb for around 300$

I just asked a very similar question over here: https://reddthat.com/post/29255208

Where I had put together a proposed self build and looking for feedback on it.

I've been running Unraid for a few years and it's been great and really user friendly as well.

I have a couple Aoostar R7's (4x in a hyper-converged ceph+cloud-hypervisor+k0s cluster, but that's overkill for most). They have been rock solid. They also have an n100 version with less storage expansion if you don't need it. My nodes probably idle at about 20w fully loaded with drives (2x nvme, 1x sata SSD, 1x sata HDD). Running ~15 containers and a VM or 2. You should be able to easily get 1 (plus memory and drives) for $1000. Throw proxmox and/or some NAS OS on it and you're good to go.

With Synology your not getting the latest greatest hardware your basically buying the DSM operating system.

DSM is a really nice one stop shop though.

Unless you know you're doing something DSM can't support it's hard to go wrong with Synology.

Just make sure whatever version you buy has access to the DSM apps. For instance, you said you use docker, so make sure the Synology device you're interested in works with Container Management.

I run a Proxmox cluster with 2x Dreamquest pro, each with 2x10TB had in an IcyBox, plus an external Raspberry Pie with a 12 TB disk for backup.

The disks are refurbished to keep the costs down but run in a mirror setup. So if one fails, I’m fine. I use an old laptop as a 3rd node and the main nodes replicate their load, so I‘m fine even when one node is dead.

An N100 would be fine, I use it for my own server. Despite it being about as fast as an i5-6500T with a general benchmark, quicksync makes a big difference when encoding video with e.g. Jellyfin. I "upgraded" from a i5-6500T to a custom built N100 server and the performance improved a lot. However, if you plan on hosting game servers it probably won't be enough.

There's lots of ways to skin this particular cat. My current approach is low powered Synology (j series?) for mass storage, then 1 litre PC's running proxmox for my compute power using their NVME for storage, all backed up to the Synology.