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)
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.
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.
I got a small network running with Linux, android and Windows, but seldom use it. Windows install worked fine, but it remember it was not well documented (needed to use some argument for it to setup the service). Don’t use nextcloud but I do have vaultwarden working over it.
I’m planning to move to headscale due to the certificate management overhead.
Some ppl pointed out you can. NAS it’s just a tiny computer with a dedicated enclosure running 24/7 with a lot of services running to do multiple things because…is running 24/7! Is you just want to upload some files for a backup is better an external HDD through USB. Connect, upload, disconnect.
If you want your computer do more things you have to check how the computer handle these services by software or hardware(hardware better) A list of questions:
It support aspm (yes/not)
It support virtualization.
BIOS come with a dedicated raid chip
How many video codecs the processor/iGPU can decode
Ethernet port is, at least, gigabit
RAM is >4GB
You’re willing to spend time configuring and taking care of the thing
If a few of questions, or all, are NO I think it’s better to invest in an external USB HDD case.
My NAS is just a very old Acer desktop from like 2011. I bought a Fractal Meshify 2 case which can hold I think 14 hard drives and moved the internals into that. Works great.
Eventually I had to get a pcie card for more data ports, and replace the power supply with one that’s more than 300w.
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.
A NAS is basically some software running on a computer, so you can use a desktop as that computer, ideally with a light operating system (for example, Linux in text only mode).
HOWEVER: desktops are designed for far higher computational loads than needed by a NAS, plus things like graphical user interfaces and direct connection of user peripherals such as mice, so even when idle they consume a lot more power than the kind of hardware used in a typical NAS.
Also the hardware in a good NAS will have things like extra higher speed connectors for HDDs/SDDs (such as SATA) rather than you having to use slower stuff like USB.
So keep in mind that a desktop as NAS will consume significantly more power than a dedicated NAS (as the latter will probably be running on something like an ARM and have a power source dimensioned for a couple of HDDs, not to run a dedicate graphics card like a desktop has) and probably won’t fit as many disks.
If you’re ok with having most disks be accessed a bit slower and USB3 work for you (and, for example, if your NAS is on 100 Mbit Ethernet, it’s the network that’s the slowest thing, not USB3) then it’s usually better to use an old notebook rather than desktop because notebooks were designed for running of batteries hence consume significantly less power.
Frankly I would advise against using an old desktop as NAS mainly because in a year or two of continued use you’ll have paid enough in extra electricity costs vs using a NAS to pay for a simple but decent dedicated NAS.
If they were to run some applications on the side it would validate the power usage. Like if it also was a Plex server it could be more reasonable to use more power.
Could also really hinge on the electricity cost for their region. At 10 cents a kwh and a delta of 100 watts we’d be talking 87 dollars a year assuming it’s always running at a delta of 100 watts.
I doubt there will be a 100 watt delta especially newer architectures that idle really well.
Whilst a 100W delta seems unlikelly, a 50W delta seems realistic as the kind of stuff you have in a NAS will use maybe 5W (about the same as a Raspberry PI, possibly less) whilst the typical desktop PC uses significantly more even outside graphics mode (part of the reason to use Linux in text mode only is exactly to try and save power there). It mainly depends on what the desktop was used for before: a “gaming PC” with a dedicated graphics card from an old enough generation (i.e. with HW from back before the manufactures of GPUs started competing on power usage) will use signiificantly more power than integrated graphics even in idle mode.
That said, making it a “home server” as you suggest makes a lot of sense - if that thing is an “All In One” server (media server, NAS, print server, torrent download server and so on) loaded with software of your choice (and hence stuff that respects your privacy and doesn’t shove Ads in your face) it’s probably a superior solution to getting those things as separate standalone devices, especially in the current era of enshittification.
I’ve heard good things about H2O AI if you want to self host and tweak the model by uploading documents of your own (so that you get answers based on your dataset). I’m not sure how difficult it is. Maybe someone more knowledgeable will chime in.
So I recently went through all of this headache. I started really wanting hotswap that didn’t look like it was from the 90’s. I also needed like 8 drives capacity which rules a lot of the popular cases out.
I thought about it for a while and I don’t really touch the drives at all on any of my previous Nas builds so that meant I didn’t need hotswap.
Eventually I decided that rather than try to hide the case away I would make it a feature of my living room and I went with the tower 500 and I really love it and everyone that has gone over has mentioned how cool it looks
That looks an awful lot like what I have. I’m using the Lian Li PC-D600. I think I’ve managed to get my hands on one of the last ones in the wild. They aren’t even available used on eBay anymore.
What I like most about it (and the Tower 500 that you linked) is that the motherboard is on one side, and the drives are on the other. Keeping the drives cool is easy, I just upgraded the fans on my SATA backplanes and the case, and even under load the drives run very cool.
You can have this case when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
I went with this www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/…/cs382/. It’s pretty decent but you are putting a hard cap on expansion. Also the fans it comes with are pretty loud so I’d replace them.
I got out of the “surplus hardware” a while ago; way too expensive and noisy to run, so super recommend ditching the poweredge. for home use, I ended up just going with a USB3 JBOD for storage, and a Intel NUC (which I think they don’t make anymore). it runs a ton of virtualized servers under kvm, a virtualized NAS, all without issue because it honestly spends most of its time nearly idle. point is: it’s definitely nice to have it all in one case and with high speed storage but maybe having to find something that can house a ton of drives isn’t a strict need if you aren’t actually going to put a ton of load on it.
I use restic with resticprofiles (one config file), notifications via (self hosted) ntfy.sh and wasabi as backend. Been very happy, runs reliably and has all the features of a modern backup solution, especially like the option to mount backups as if it were a filesystem with snapshots as folders, makes finding that one file easy without having to recover)
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