homelab upgrade recommendations - eviltoast

Hello I’ve been playing around with an old laptop as my home server for 1 year and I think that now it’s a good time to upgrade to something better since it feels a bit too slow.

I was thinking to buy a synology but I would prefer something custom because I hate that sometimes the manufacturers decide to abandon support or change all their terms of service.

My budget is about 1000$ USD, I’m looking for it to have at least 20TB and the option to later add a graphics card would be nice.

What do you recommend to buy? Also what software do you recomend? Also could it work with an n100 mini PC?

I’ve been using Ubuntu server, with docker containers for several services, but I mainly use it for Nextcloud

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    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.