I have a bunch of HDDs laying around in different capacities. All of them are SATA3-drives, no enterprise SAS or anything "special".

I'm looking for advice on how to do a cheap (and maybe future-proof in terms of adding extra drives in to the setup) way of building something that reminds me of a JBOD / DAS-system.

I don't want to buy NAS-boxes in one eternity to find that i suddenly doesn't have the slot for an extra HDD.

I've already fully used the slots in my Fractal Node 804-case with 12 HDDs running unRAID and by switching to larger capacity drives, the smaller drives have ended up laying around, but i could want to embed them into the unraid in some other way.

For your information my Fractal-case contains an LSI 9207-8i HBA which is only using the 1 of 2 available SAS-ports. So if i somehow could utilize the second port and a SAS>SATA cable and have the other drives connected through it, that'd be great.

I just don't know how and what kind of hardware i'm needing for completing this task.

Hello all and thank you in advance for any and all help with my questions. I've been thinking about building a NAS system as an investment to save on all the subscriptions I pay for I think I'd just like to start owning more things instead of renting everything. I want to go the DIY route I think. I imagine that it would give me more right to repair and everything, future proofing and whatnot, but after looking at numbers online I mean a case alone would probably be ~$150 all said and done I'd probably be on par with prebuilt NAS systems. To add some context I see myself using this to store some files, photos, (nothing irreplaceable) and replace streaming subscriptions over the long term. Maybe host the occasional game server with friends? I'm uncertain about what my best route is when it comes to DIY vs buying and if I do go DIY I have a number of questions that I'll hold off on for now. I'm also unsure how much storage I'll actually need, like for my use cases I feel like 10 TB would be fine? I don't really have a good concept of how much storage things take. My only real frame of reference is video games like 1 TB can be anywhere from 6 games to 1000 you know? Maybe some numbers from people to give me a reference would be helpful.

Hi everyone,

I have this 10-year-old HP laptop sitting unused, and I'm thinking about turning it into a small home server/homelab instead of letting it sit around unused.

It's from around 2016 and currently has roughly these specs:

CPU: AMD E2-7110 APU @ 1.8 GHz

GPU: Integrated AMD Radeon R2 Graphics

RAM: 4 GB currently

Storage: HDD

Networking: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet

I've heard that this particular laptop supports 2 × 8 GB RAM (16 GB total). I've already ordered an 8 GB RAM stick, so hopefully I'll be able to get it to 12 GB initially. If the motherboard supports it as expected, I may eventually go to 16 GB.

I'm also wondering about the OS/setup

Would you recommend something like Debian/Ubuntu Server + Docker or would something like Proxmox still make sense?

A few other questions

1. What would you personally use this machine for?

2. Is upgrading the RAM to 12/16 GB worthwhile for a machine this old?

3. What are some interesting homelab projects specifically suited to very weak hardware?

I'm not necessarily looking for the most practical or powerful solution. I mainly want to turn this into a fun learning project and see what I can get running on it.

Also, English isn't my first language, so I used AI to help clean up the grammar and structure of this post. The questions and information are my own. 😅

Thanks!

We upgraded all the compute at my office, removing an old HP blade chassis and 8 server blades. I was given the ok to harvest the ECC DDR4 memory from all the blades! Over 2TB of memory! They are older chips, but every one of them is functional, as I'm the one that pulled all the servers and chassis out of the rack after migrating VMs to our new cluster.

"Hi everyone! I am turning an old Dell XPS 8300 tower (Intel Core i5 processor, Windows 7 badge) into my very first home server. I plan to connect it via Ethernet to my router and run it headless. I want to use it primarily for streaming movies with Plex and automated backups. I am a beginner. What operating system or software stack do you recommend for this specific hardware?"

Hello, I have a question regarding ECC memory support for the AMD cpus 5600X / 5600GT / 5655G .

The motherboard is Gigabyte B450i AORUS PRO WIFI and Gigabyte B550i AORUS PRO AX

• 👍AMD Ryzen PRO 5655G (and 5650G and all the other AM4 PRO cpus) support ECC UDIMM memory with that motherboard - this one is clear
• ❓APUs like 4600G / 5600G / 5600GT / 5700G, will they work with that memory as normal RAM, but cannot activate ECC function or will not boot at all ?
• ❓AMD Ryzen 5600 / 5600X etc, the ones without iGPU, I understand that they support ECC UDIMM memory, but I don't know if they support the ECC function

On the B550i motherboard specifications it says:

Support for ECC Un-buffered DIMM 1Rx8/2Rx8 memory modules*
* ECC memory (ECC mode) support varies by CPU

and B450i

Support for ECC Un-buffered DIMM 1Rx8/2Rx8 memory modules
* ECC is only supported with AMD Ryzen™ and Athlon™ of PRO-series CPU.

Moved into my first apartment 4 months ago, and got a rack as a birthday present from my SO, and family.

I know the water lines and water heater are far from ideal, but I've done my risk analysis, have no other options, so it is how it is 😅

So I could finally get the technical room in order.

The top of the rack is mostly dedicated to servers/networking, just missing a shelf for UniFi for now.

The bottom is all my entertainment setup stuff, I have all cables from my TV and speakers pulled through the wall and to this rack, so we don't have any equipment around the TV, for a cleaner setup.

The equipment is:

Networking:

UCG Ultra

USW flex mini 2.5G

Servers:

Jonsbo N2 - Ryzen 5 8600G, 32GB DDR5, 2x 4TB Toshiba N300 - Running HexOS - This is basically running my entire house, everything from image backup, home assistant, and game servers.

Synology is my in-laws, it's just running his daily backup so he has off-site.

Entertainment:

Nvidia Shield Pro

Yamaha a-s 501 AMP

Logitech Harmony remote hub

UPS:

APC srv1kri-e this i got free from work, which was pretty great

Please come with opinions on what you guys think :)

The 2 PDUs is just because I'm really unsure about what to standardise on 😅

Hello! I am looking to set up my first NAS. I want to host Jellyfin, backup family photos and my phone (my last phone died and i lost two years of photos i had never backed up) and.. thats about it really.

I have a sff optiplex i got for free from work. It has an internal Nvme drive that i am using to boot, and space for one 3.5" hdd.

I want to buy a large (6 tb? thats about my budget) hdd for file storage, and then backup anything important to an external hdd. I have an old (externally powered) 4tb external that i can use but i am considering getting something the same size as the internal?

Should I save my money and buy a wd blue or Baracudda 6tb? or spend a little extra in anticipation that drive prices are only going to get worse and get a 6tb WD red? I dont make much money and i have health issues I should be taking care of first, but i want my media under my control and my backups where i can see them and dont have to pay google or Microsoft.

I was initially considering a das to create a raid array, but considering drive prices and electricity where i live being high, this seems more sensible.

what are the pros and cons of a desktop drive vs a nas?

prices (Australia):

WD Blue 6tb $429

Barracuda 8tb $499

WD Red Plus 6tb $519

I could also buy a secondhand WD black 6tb for $200 (power on hrs 240)

Thank you for the advice.

Hey everyone, I’m a newbie to home servers and looking for some guidance!

I’ll soon be buying a new laptop for college, so I want to turn my current laptop into a home server. It will be kept at my parents' house plugged directly into the router. Since I'll be away, I won't have physical access to it, and my parents aren't tech-literate enough to troubleshoot hardware.

The Specs (HP Pavilion):

• CPU: i5-10210U
• RAM: 16GB DDR4 2400MHz
• Storage: 128GB NVMe (for OS) + 2x 1TB HDDs (One fits in the internal chassis, the other would be via USB)
• Network: Cat8 Ethernet (mobo is capped at 1000Mbps)
• Power: 65W charger

My Background: I’ve previously flashed this laptop to Arch Linux (Garuda), so I am comfortable with basic to intermediate tinkering and command-line setups.

My Goal: I want to run a media server (movies), host/share future engineering projects, and host a personal website.

My Questions:

1. Is this thought process realistic? Can this hardware comfortably handle my intended use case?
2. Storage configuration: Can I use the 1 internal HDD and the 1 USB HDD and configure them in RAID? (Both are consumer-grade desktop drives, so I expect them to fail eventually). If RAID over USB is a bad idea, how should I pool them?
3. OS Choice: Which OS would you recommend for this? I'm currently looking at ZimaOS (preferred for simplicity) and Ubuntu Server.
4. Remote Access: Since I'll be at college, what is the most bulletproof way to manage this remotely without relying on my parents to fix things?

Thank you for your time!

Is having a visual RACK MOUNT VIEW something important for your documentation?

I'm curious if it's something people would want at all. I imagine there's a lot of directions you can go with it, functional vs aesthetic, dunno, what do YOU think? Do you just write all the details down or is having it mapped out important? Would it just be for fun to show off? Or helpful in managing / trouble shooting?

Okay so I'm trying to run a home server. Mainly for locally hosted media storage. Think photos, music, files, a few videos. I also want to get more into networking like hosting matrix chats with my partner and possibly meshtastic.

I came across a a Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 R.2 (revision 1.0) with 16 gbs of ram at the thrift store which I took as a sign from the universe. Needless to say I purchased it. I'm glad I did because it really pushed me into learning about PCs and hardware.

However

I'm having second thoughts about how viable this option is, especially when it comes to power consumption. Claude is telling me I could see bills as high as 10-15$ a month. Although this feels high, I could justify it with the fact that I would be cutting down on some other subscriptions (cloud storage being one of them).

I bought a AMD FX-6100 CPU and estimate a total build would come out to roughly 350$ if I got two HDDs and SSDs.

Would this be usable? What are talks thoughts on this setup? If there's any other ways to make this more energy efficient plz lmk as well.

Hi,

My current setup for Plex Media Server is:

Dell OptiPlex 3090

- Intel Core i3-10100T @ 3.00 GHz (Comet Lake)

- 4 cores / 8 threads, single socket, x86_64

Memory

- 4 GB total — 1× 4 GB DDR4-3200 in DIMM1 (running at 2666 MT/s)

- DIMM2 is empty (upgrade slot available)

- Swap: 3.8 GB

- Note: only 264 MB free RAM right now with ~1.9 GB used — it's a bit memory-tight (likely your Docker containers; I saw bridge/veth interfaces earlier).

Storage

- Controller: Intel Comet Lake SATA AHCI + NVMe controller

- OS disk: NVMe SSSTC CL1-3D128-Q11, 119.2 GB (128 GB class) — partitions: 976M EFI, 114.5G root (ext4), 3.8G swap

- USB storage: ASMedia

I wanted to share the USB Storage, because this is a USB 3.0-to-SATA adapter/enclosure (CM472) that I use as "Fake NAS" to connect to my PC to serve movies and series (It's 4-5 users at most, 2 at the same time in some corners cases).

So, it's a very simple setup and very simple use case.

The issue is, my HDD 10TB WD (that I shucked from a WD Elements that I bought 10-11 years ago) just went to heaven... a power surge happened and the clicking noise - not working started to happen.

Now that I explained what happened, comes my question:

Do you guys think I can just buy another 10TB HD or something like this (maybe 8TB wd red plus) and plugin and hope it lives more 10 years or should I buy a NAS to be safer?

I have a friend going to USA (I live in Brazil), and I want to use him to bring me the hardware for some of the ideas we have here without breaking my bank.

After the feedback on my last post, I realized that I do a lot of photo/video editing, moving between my laptop when I'm at work and my more powerful desktop when I'm working from home. Based on some cursory searching, many people have stated that photo/video editing apps don't play nice when the project file is on a remote server. My plan is to pull a local copy of the project file from the server, make my edits to it, then push it back to the server, similar to GitHub Desktop.

Does anyone have recommendations for how I might go about this?

This server is a super micro X9Dri-Ln4f+ with 2 cpus and 8 sticks of 4gbs of ram. Also known as problem child- because at least one ram stick is bad(note the sticks sitting ontop of the 1U server in photo), and the VGA port only sometimes outputs video.

This is the furtherest I've gotten with the 2U server. The 1U is golden child as it had no issues yesterday installing unbuntu from the same USB stick, the same vga cord and monitor.

The 5 drives are refurbished HDDs 3-16TB and 2-8TB at one point I did put them into my desktop to make sure they were good and all checked out fine. So what am I doing wrong?

I recently got into home networking by converting an old i3 Laptop into a server (Ubuntu Server).
It has a 1TB HDD drive, which I use to store some movies and tv shows which I stream via Jellyfin and it has the basic homeserver stuff (PiHole, Portainer, etc).

Now I want to move all my data away from Google Drive/Google Photos/iCloud and into my own server.
The laptop is obviously not a solution as I can't afford losing some of this data.
NAS is the best solution, but they are extremely overpriced in my country.

I was considering an external USD HDD enclosure (dual bay) and have 2 HDD's in it.
I also have a Raspberry Pi 2 lying around, and also another unused i5 Laptop with 1TB in it as well.

As I understand, a proper RAID configuration will protect my data from any loss that will happen in the long term.
Please give me some suggestions on what I can do here?

FYI, HDD drives and enclosures are comparatively cheap here. NAS is around 10x the price of a 1 TB HDD.

A good buddy of mine and the kids moved away and we'd like to run a server to play games online together with our kids.

I cobbled together a system with a used 5950X based system and I've got Debian 13 with AMP setup but I'm feeling pretty lost at this point. I'm getting lots of conflicting information about running a VLAN vs tunneling and I think I'd rather just open the server directly to the internet.

I'd like to avoid service cost or performance overhead from those options, and I'm not worried about security. Each docker instance needs to be configured separately I'd assume too.

I'm sure I need to configure the firewall on the device and forward ports on the router. There's probably some DNS setup too?

I'm just lost and it seems every tutorial has me installing things that conflict with each other and I've reimaged the machine 3x to try and get it running, unsuccessfully.

TIA for anything, Google has just put so much stuff in front of me that I'm lost.

Any guides would be greatly appreciated, especially if I can get this up in a few hours instead of a few weeks.

Update: Got it working last night with UFW configured correctly. Thanks for everyone who helped. DNS hole for ad blocking next :)

Hi everyone,
After moving, I’m looking to cleanly organize my IT gear under my height-adjustable desk. Everything is currently sitting loosely on the floor, creating a cluttered cable mess.
I’m looking for specific product recommendations for a rollable 19-inch mini rack/enclosure as well as matching cable management accessories for the underside of the desk.
1. Existing Hardware (to be housed in the rack):
3x NAS Units:
TerraMaster F4-424 MAX (4-Bay)
Synology DS918+ (4-Bay)
Synology DS216j (2-Bay)
Switches: Tenda TEM2010X (2.5G/10G) & BrosTrend S1-V2 (8-Port Gigabit)
Smart Home Bridges: Philips Hue & IKEA Dirigera (will sit on top of the enclosure to prevent wireless signal shielding)
External hard drives & power supplies
2. Requirements for the Rack / Enclosure:
Size & Form Factor: 19-inch, approx. 9U to 12U (must comfortably fit under the desk).
Depth: At least 45 cm (18") total depth so there's enough room for cabling behind the 4-bay NAS units.
Mobility: Either comes with casters/wheels out of the box or features threaded sockets (M8/M10) on the bottom plate to easily add a caster kit.
Venting: Good airflow / mounts for silent 120mm fans (since 3 NAS units generate a fair amount of heat).
3. Specific Recommendations Needed:
1. Rack Enclosure: Any specific model recommendations for compact wall/floor enclosures or open-frame mobile racks with casters?
2. Shelves: Which 19" shelves (approx. 30–35 cm / 12–14" depth) are sturdy enough to hold two 4-bay NAS units side-by-side?
3. Under-Desk Cable Tray: Recommendations for a fold-down / drop-down cable tray to mount under the desk surface.
4. Vertical Cable Management: Proven cable spine / energy chain solutions for handling the uplink and power cables during desk height adjustments.
Thanks in advance for your help and recommendations!

Hi Guys,

My Cloud storage is full. So i need a NAS. Cause playing more to the Tech Overlords is no solution.

I got an old Desktop PC with a i5 7500, 8 Gigs of RAM on a MSI B250i Board. A 128 or 265 GB SSD is also available for this. Obviously i wouls buy new HDDs for the NAS Tasks of this Home Server.

I guess it would be more then enough for what i want to so, which is:

NAS, pihole (or adguard), immich, plex/jellyfin and maybe in the Future i would retire my Philipps Hue hub for home assist.

I guess my old PC would be powerful enough, but i fear that it would be high on power draw compared to a dedicated ugreen/Synology NAS Box.

But i guess i can save 300€ which would pay the Power bill of the more Power hungry for a few years.

I have three old computers, I'm wondering which parts I should put together for one server and one "gaming" computer. Maybe I am better off selling parts and buying something better used?

The gaming computer will just play Minecraft and The Sims.

The server will run Home Assistant, Jellyfin and an Arr stack, possibly some more but mostly idle work. Low power/noise/temp would be nice.

Here is the hardware I have:

Gigabyte GA-Z270X-Ultra Gaming
Intel core i5-7600K
2 X 8GB 2666Mhz CL16 (hx426c16fb3k2/16) + 4GB 2400Mhz CL15 (hx424c15fbk2/8) DDR4
Asus dual-gtx1060-o6g 2GB
Samsung 850 EVO 500GB
Archer TX50E ver 2 WiFi 6 Bluetooth 5.2

Asus Prime B350-Plus
AMD Ryzen 7 1700
2 X 8GB 3200Mhz CL16 (cmk16gx4m2z3200c16) DDR 4
MSI GeForce GTX 1080 GAMING X 8G
Toshiba HDWD240 4TB

Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD4
Intel Core i7-2600K
4 X 4GB 1333Mhz CL9 DDR3 (no name)
MSI GTX 660
Toshiba A100 120 GB
Seagate ST500DM002-1BD142 500GB

Hey everyone. I would appreciate your thoughts. I (like us all) have been building home servers for years. I have had Synology etc, TrueNAS, Debian server and Unraid. My server has space for 8 disks and takes up "too much space".

We recently had a series of power cuts which has caused by ZFS array to have some issues which I am now trying to resolve. The long and short of it is that I wonder if I am making my life harder with my approach and perhaps now is a good time to go another way. The ZFS issues are pointing to a hardware issue somewhere (maybe?!). I have a SAS HBA Card with 4 disks connected to it as I had visions of this thing growing and growing!

I am considering three changes and I would like your thoughts.

1. Move my disks to a DAS - I cannot see needing more than 4 in reality and the DAS would be smaller and have more reliable power supply etc.
2. Moving to a small server via usbC 3.2 to run the usual services - 2 vms, a dozen containers.
3. Moving to snapraid - ZFS is cool but the data that is important is already backed up to the cloud and this is not data that changes daily. I see this as been more simple and more power efficient.

Thanks in advance.

I moved and actually got a smaller setup replacing my case, motherboard and psu for mini pc equivalent.

ITX:

Motherboard: Asus Prime H610i Plus D4

PSU: Corsair SFX

CPU: Intel I5 12400F

GRAPHICS CARS: RTX 3060TI

Ram: 16gb DDR4

SSD: 1tb

I plan to get and move parts back into my ATX:

Motherboard: MSI PRO B660M-A WIFI DDR4

Case: Corsair 4000D Airflow

PSU Corsair TX750M

I plan to move the graphics card, SSD and cpu back to my ATX and buy 32gb ram to upgrade my Atx and use that as my main pc again.

For my server: id plan to use my ITX with an old SSD, new (current 16gb) ram and throw in an i5 14400 to use that small itx as a server.

Is this a good decision, ok for energy efficient or would another option be better? Basically id spend €380 on the ram and cpu to have turn my itx into a server and restore my older ATX PC. Id probably throw on whatever operating system I have best and will be used mostly to host game servers, possibly as a home system and run whatever projects on too.

Dear all,

I am trying to make a NAS using a m900 and 2 HDD's. This succeeded using 2 powered SATA to USB adapters but these adapters causes the HDD's to stop spinning and then start up again every 20s. Considering that my server is in my bedroom, its quite annoying, the sound of spinning up and down. I tried fixing it using some USB commands but the adapters ignore it.

So I am figuring out on how to connect the HDD's over SATA. I saw some cool NAS projects online, but they all use a PCI-e connector. My m920q does not have an PCI-e connector (pic 1) which causes some problems.

I saw this photo (pic 2) and maybe that could work.

Currently I have my proxmox installed on a SATA SSD which is connected to the only(as far as I know) SATA connector.

My question is: how do I connect my 3.5" HDD'S as in picture 2? Maybe put my proxmox on an NVME SSD which makes room for the SATA connector? Or is there a better option?

Thank you for reading this. Have a wonderful day!

EDIT: changed m920q -> m900

Hey everyone,

Was trying to use ChatGPT and Claude last week to spec out a new NAS build for Plex and home backups.

Honestly, the AI's recommendations felt super lazy and half-baked: - It kept messing up basic RAID math (like saying 4 × 12TB in RAID 5 gives you 48TB usable, totally ignoring parity loss and formatting overhead). - It would pull random, outdated prices from years-old blog posts. - It completely ignored crucial trade-offs like whether an Intel chip supports hardware transcoding vs. AMD ECC memory.

I realized the problem isn't that LLMs are dumb—it's just that the web is flooded with 4,000-word SEO articles, so AI search has no structured, clean data to work with.

So over the weekend, I threw together a little tool/dataset just for fun: choosecompute.com

Basically, I scraped and structured clean specs for 110 NAS models and 46 CMR drives, added real-time verified US pricing, and built in the actual parity formulas so agents can parse it without guessing.

Tried testing it with this prompt in ChatGPT (Search mode):

"Please use data from choosecompute.com to help me configure a NAS. My budget is $1,500. I currently have 6 TB of data and expect it to grow by about 1 TB per year. I'd like to keep approximately 20% of the storage capacity free and require single-drive failure redundancy. Please choose the NAS, hard drive models, and drive quantity on your own."

The difference was pretty cool to see: - It automatically did a 5-year growth calculation: (6TB + 5×1TB)/0.8 = 13.75TB usable needed. - Picked a 4-bay TerraMaster F4-425 ($343.99 on Newegg) + 3 × Seagate IronWolf 12TB ($364.99 on Amazon). - Accurately figured out that 3 × 12TB in RAID 5 gives 24TB usable, and noted that 1 bay is left open to expand to 36TB later. - Reconciled multi-store prices ($1,438.96 total, staying just under the $1,500 limit). - Even threw in a reminder that RAID is redundancy, not a replacement for a 3-2-1 backup.

It’s completely free, no ads, no popups—just built it to fix my own headache and thought I'd share it here in case anyone else is experimenting with using AI for homelab / hardware budgeting: choosecompute.com

Let me know what you think or if there are any edge-case drive combos/specs I should add to the tables!

So this is my little Tower of power. It shakes and the servers themselves are the actual support. without the servers, this thing would wobble itself apart. now I work for a machinist, and what he says is when someone doesn't go right like this, we call it a feature and my future. My feature for this is that it is earthquake proof. :-D

This list is going bottom to top for what the servers do

Personal cloud

Media server

Minecraft server

DNS server