Source
r/HomeServer•
ExtruDR

General Advice Needed (Looking to Clean Up/Upgrade Home Server Setup)

My apologies for a post that is probably made here too often, if there is a resource or post that you can direct me to if my question is too basic, I would very much appreciate it.

I currently have a Synology DS416 with 16TB of raw storage using SHR (Synology's RAID scheme) ith 12TB usable. This is used for some shared storage on my home network, TimeMachine backups, Plex server, and more ad-hoc Windows backups using AOMEI Backupper (which I don't like much).

Alongside this, I have a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant and my Asus Router also providing WireGuard VPN access.

The DiskStation is pretty slow at times and it feels like maybe having only a single "always on" machine would be more elegant.

I don't know much about containers, docker, ProxMox, etc. but I am somewhat capable of getting my hands dirty with Linux to set up an OpenMediaServer or TrueNAS or FreeNAS setup to get HA and all of the other backup and media serving services hosted properly.

What is the generally most smooth all-in-one software solution for a home server like the one I described?

What kind of machine is generally used for this sort of workload. The idea of building an x64 mini system with hot-swap bays is appealing, but I don' t know where to start.

Posted May 29, 2023, 2:32 AM UTC

32
Net-Runner•

If you need any VMs/Containers, go with Proxmox, and if you are seeking advanced storage management, go with TrueNAS/OMV/Starwinds SAN and NAS or even pure Debian/Alma running storage and sharing it to the network. If you need HA (high availability) between multiple storage nodes - some of them do have it embedded. In short, there is no unified "best" solution for doing all. Use best from all worlds. Hypervisor for virtualization and NAS OS for storage management.

As per hardware - most X86-64 platforms gonna be faster than Synology.

3
Party_9001Hyper-V / vTrueNAS / vWindows 10•

I am somewhat capable of getting my hands dirty with Linux to set up an OpenMediaServer or TrueNAS or FreeNAS setup to get HA

I was mostly following along until this part. Where does HA fit into any of this?

What is the generally most smooth all-in-one software solution for a home server like the one I described?

I guess if you want HA then TrueNAS enterprise is the only one that can do that...?

What kind of machine is generally used for this sort of workload.

With plex, any machine with an Intel 8th gen or above. Without plex, any machine running DDR4 and above.

The idea of building an x64 mini system with hot-swap bays is appealing, but I don' t know where to start.

Not really relevant to the post, but now I'm curious. Why do people call "regular" CPUs x86 when they're not 32 bit anymore? It's always something like x86 vs ARM when it's not actually a 32 bit CPU. Huh.

Back to the post; hotswap is overrated IMO. It's useful to be sure, but not worth planning an entire build around. If it didn't cost extra, whether that comes in the form of money, limited HW selection etc then sure. But that's not the case (badum tsst).

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