I’m using a NetApp ds4246 to hold 24 drives, and it’s glorious - embrace the rack mount life. Although my computers themselves are all HP Prodesk minis, which are tiny and amazing, 1 u high and can fit two across on a shelf.
I have been looking to do this as well, I’m just not 100% sure how it all connects together. Do you have the disk shelf connect to a server with lots of sas cards?
For self hosting I’d recommend either one of the Meshify 2 or Define 7, depending on local price and your specific needs. I personally went with the Meshify 2 XL and was blown away by the quality of the case. It’s built well and allows for a variety of configurations. It also makes maintenance very easy as the filters and side panels can all be removed without any tool to handle dust build up.
I’m not sure I can recommend anything without knowing your goals. For me my needs quickly outgrew my little mini PC and now I have a cluster with a few single board computers. Here’s a basic list of what I run:
Dell workstation (proxmox):
Linux Mint
GPU and USB passed though via Virtio with a sata to USB adapter for connecting the bluray drive
Used as a desktop and is an alternative to my laptop.
It also hosts Jellyfin in a podman container
Docker 0
Nextcloud
TrueNAS
This is a TrueNAS VM with a dedicated sata controller passed though to it. Its used for storage for nextcloud and jellyfin.
Mini PC (proxmox)
landmass
this is a simple LXC container to act as a wireguard client with a caddy proxy. It allows me to access my HDhomerun as it is in another building (long story)
caddy
this used to be for accessing my homerun but is now just for remote access via ssh.
outside access
this is a VM that connects to the VM in linode to route traffic. It runs Ngnix proxy manager and is a wireguard client.
docker1
this hosts Matrix and Drupal. Matrix is basiclly unusable for me because as soon as I start joining rooms the resource usage shoots though the roof and it sometimes crashes
Linode
I have a VM in Linode that routes traffic into outside access via wireguard. It also runs Ngnix proxy manager.
Friendlywrt
I have a Nanopi that acts as a firewall and dhcp server to isolate everything.
This is a incomplete list and doesn’t include my firewall rules or other security measures. I also run Debian on all VMs as it is easy to setup and maintain. If you are looking for somewhere to start I would start by installing nextcloud in a docker container. Proxmox will scale the best but if you are just looking to learn I would install Debian and docker compose. TrueNAS is great for a NAS but its designed to be an appliance so it can be limiting.
These guys do short depth PCs. I wish I knew where they got their cases from, because they are really nice!
But I haven’t found anything decent in the wild (I eventually gave up and got a deeper rack so I can use old r730 servers)
As a self taught self-hosting enthusiast i wouldn’t recommend ansible to a beginner. I know that sounds backwards as absible makes everything easy and does all the work for you but that’s also part of the problem. It would be like jumping behind the wheel of a self driving car without knowing how to drive at all. When (not if) something goes wrong it could go wrong hard and you’d lose the whole instance.
It’s better to start with some other self hosted projects that interest you to get a feel for the process and software like docker then work your way up to bigger things like lemmy. I consider myself fairly versed in the process and lemmy still gave me some issues to set up and my pixelfed instance still won’t federate despite my best efforts. I’m pretty sure i know the issue, i just need to get around to fixing it.
Last thought, the raspberry pi is a pretty impressive little pc for it’s size and price point but you might find yourself quickly burning through resources depending on the number of active users you have and how heavily you use it.
Learning how to use your pi to run a reverse proxy to a self hosted blogging site would give you plenty of hands on starter experience. Run docker and portainer and mess with docker config files from a webgui to see what work and what doesn’t.
You could set up a dns based ad-blocker like pihole and a vpn like wireguard to tunnel your phone back into your home network so you have ad-blocking on the go, too. That’s a semi beginner protect with plenty of tutorials to pick from.
You could run nextcloud, syncthing, or immich to make your own cloud at home but that might need more than a basic pi setup.
It’s a great software to run. I like to watch youtube tutorials that explain things step by step so i can understand what happens. If i find a good video i’ll see what other software that channel may have a tutorial on and if that software may interest me.
So, I’m not new to this (omg it’s been 6+ years now wtf) but I don’t host a lot of stuff, and it’s been pretty easy to poke at; I’ve got:
plex
minecraft (bedrock and java)
freshrss
rustdesk
home assistant
vaultwarden
pihole
actual (budget software)
Running in docker containers, along with a few of the built-in plug-and-play services on my nas. Of that list, plex, minecraft, freshrss, rustdesk, and vaultwarden were very easy to setup in my situation. Rustdesk is a really good remote control program/service, vaultwarden is a fork of the bitwarden server, and plex was almost comically simple to get going as a media host.
How’s performance on that setup? I own the case and am looking to do the exact same vdev setup this next year, but am wondering if the wider vdevs negatively impact performance in any noticeable way. Also wondering if 128gb of ram is too little for that kind of setup with 20tb drives, I feel like I might have to find out the hard way…
Performance is great IMO, I store all my Plex media on this setup as a network share and never have any issues or slowdowns. I only use the setup as a strict NAS nothing else.
I started with 9 drives at 12tb first, about 3 years later (mid this year) i added the second vdev to my main pool. 9 drives 20tb each.
V-devs do not require to be the same size between v-devs, but they do require to have the same amount of drives in each.
I have unraid and proxmox setups on other machines running independently. Plex and other software for example all access my TrueNAS over the network.
For the TrueNAS system IMO you don’t need much “horsepower”. I run it on a 12 year old motherboard, 12gb ram and a 60gb SSD to boot. Nothing special at all. Unraid and proxmox on the other hand is where I spend the money on ram and processing power.
My Network is gigabit and I get full speed on network transfers, looking to do 10gb in the future, but that would require 10gb NIC’s in all my PC’s and new network switches. Don’t see it effecting my TrueNAS sytem setup. Besides your network transfer is only as fast as the read/write of the drives.
What OS are you planning on running? I personally use FreeNAS(TrueNAS) and largely love it. There’s a steep initial learning curve, but it’s not too high.
I run it in a VM inside of esxi so I don’t need a lot of it’s more advanced features. But I do have a jail with deluge in it to handle my torrents. Deluge isn’t up to the task though so I may migrate to a separate VM with something else, or just make a new jail with a different client.
If your current system is a Windows PC then a super easy way to go about it is to purchase a product called Stablebit DrivePool which will allow you to combine multiple hard disks into one drive, and then do duplication of data you find important. Share that virtual drive as a Share that your other systems can see. DriePool is a super reliable product. Only downside other than the one time cost is that its redundancy is based on file duplication, which has the benefit that you can pull your drives out and use them elsewhere as any one file is always contained on a single drive, but unlike parity based solutions it’s super space inefficient to retain duplicate copies. It’s a tradeoff between simplicity and time to recover in a failure versus maximising disk use and reducing costs. Depending what your NAS is for, maybe you don’t need that redundancy but. You can also team it up with another product called SnapRaid (which is free) which can make your redundancy parity based.
I ran DrivePool for years on Windows and it’s a great product. Windows itself isn’t overly optimised for this use case, but as a predominately Mac household having access to Windows on a headless system was handy if I had to run the odd Windows only apps, so using Windows had its perks.
While Windows and a PC will cost more to operate, you’ll potentially be out well ahead if you don’t have to buy additional hardware. It’s likely worth running what you have into the ground rather than buying new hardware. There’s guides on some things you can do to optimise Windows too.
I’ve since moved to using UnRaid which is a paid product (one time purchase) designed specifically for NAS on your own PC. Great solution but I’d say that the barrier of entry is much higher than a Windows box. Still very versatile product. Moved to that as over time I’ve used a bit more Linux in my life, and I also had reduced need for Windows as the NAS OS.
Haven’t tried TrueNas but that’d be an alternative to UnRaid.
I would strongly discourage using hardware raid. Hardware raid abstracts away some of the complexity at the cost of flexibility and potentially reliability. I have yet to come across hardware raid that does proper error checking for example.
Agreed. The products I have used above, DrivePool, SnapRaid and UnRaid are all software solutions. This was important to me because I was reusing hardware and had a real eclectic mix of drives from 14TB NAS drives to 256GB laptop drives that I wanted to get more life out of.
The only hardware limitation is the parity based apps SnapRaid and UnRaid need your largest drive to be the parity one. Makes sense but in a situation like mine where I had a 14TB drive and the next closes was 8TB, that parity drive wasn’t well utilised. Not a big issue but.
www.serverbuilds.net is a popular website online for folks building NASes at home. They’re fans of Unraid as well. They’ve got a Discord if you’re looking for something more interactive. Worth checking out. 👍
My NAS is an mATX mobo with an i5, 64G RAM, 8 disk drives, 3 nvme drives, and an ARC GPU for video transcoding.
Disk drives are all mirrored. One nvme runs NixOS which is easy enough to redeploy if the drive dies. One nvme is cache on top of the disk drives. Last nvme I use for temp fast storage like Jellyfin transcoding.
Its more of a combo NAS/server as I run most self hosted apps on it (tor node, monero node, jellyfin, *arr stack, etc).
I wouldn’t call it a clone, Tailscale didn’t invent mesh VPN’s. I believe Nebula is fully self hosted, while Tailscale makes initial connections through their servers. That means Nebula is more secure and private if you’re paranoid, but also harder to set up. They’re also based on different VPN protocols.
I recently hunted for a rack mounted case for an ATX MB and PSU. The best I could find is 17.9" deep. Is your rack’s rear end closed? Any way to remove the rear panel? There is a site that’ll make you a custom rack mount case I came across. But it was mighty pricey.
Back end is open but wall-mounted. If there is a way to mount the case forward a few inches so it leaves a gap in the back, that would be fine with me.
I haven’t found any brackets that seem to do that though.
Also an option I am considering. I prefer something a little more professional if possible, but not a bad option if I can’t get something else to work.
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