6mo ago

I'm at a loss on what server to buy

I'm pretty new to self-hosting, and the NAS I'm using right now has been a pain since the moment I bought it. The Synology DS220+ just doesn't have enough CPU power for my needs, and I've recently used up all the disk space I installed, so I'm looking for a new server.

Unfortunately, all the options I've found online prioritize storage space over CPU, and I haven't had much luck finding anything that fits my needs.

Requirements: CPU: Intel Core i3 or higher, but preferably Core i5 GPU: Not needed RAM: max 64 GB, min 16 GB Storage: max 32 TB, min 10 TB Network: 10 GB SPF+ Price: max 6K CAD, preferred 3K CAD

I'm hoping to run TrueNAS Scale with Plex and Nextcloud installed, and my media library isn't likely to get larger than 5 TB, so CPU is really the main limiter of my current NAS.

As an example of something almost perfect: The TrueNAS mini X+ and R varieties would work excellently, but don't meet the CPU requirement. I wanted to look at the other systems on offer from TrueNAS, but they don't list out CPU specs for anything more advanced than the Mini line.

Of the Lenovo stuff, since it was one of the few websites with a filterable picker, the ThinkSystem SR630 V2 was the closest of fitting my requirements. It comes short on the CPU, though, and is verging on the price limit too. I also don't need 12 TB of RAM, or 1.2 PB of storage.

What do you use? Can you recommend any websites I can go to find something that fits my needs better?

58 comments

Have you considered just beige boxing a server yourself? My home server is a mini-ITX board from Asus running a Core i5, 32GB of RAM and a stack of SATA HDDs all stuffed in a smaller case. Nothing fancy, just hardware picked to fulfill my needs.
Limiting yourself to bespoke systems means limiting yourself to what someone else wanted to build. The main downside to building it yourself is ensuring hardware comparability with the OS/software you want to run. If you are willing to take that on, you can tailor your server to just what you want.
- My home server literally was just my old desktop for the longest time. I upgraded the components in my desktop, and put them into another case and that became my server. Proxmox is based on Debian so any remotely sane hardware should be supported well, then I just virtualize everything else (including the NAS) and hardware compatibility isn't even a concern.
  My current case is a Fracal Define R4 which natively supports 7 hard drives + 3 5.25 slots so I could add hot swap bays there. If I need more storage I have an extra drive cage, and the suggestion from people online is to just zip tie it to the normal one, and that gets me 11 drives of storage. Sure it won't look pretty, but it works, it's cheap, and it's scalable, and that's all that matters.
- This is the answer.
  I'm currently running 2 boxes, one an old desktop with space for 8 full-size drives (which it has). The other is a Dell SFF with three 2.5" drives as a media server/testbed.
  Hard to heat either one for the cost. To buy the equivalent of the SFF as a pre-built NAS, I'd have to spend $1500.
- This is the way.

If you think about what the "S" in "NAS" is you'll realize why they prioritize storage...
You want a general purpose server.

I would consider using your Synology for what it's good at - storage.
My homelab has a Synology DS1618 and servers are Lenovo M90q systems. They have enough compute to get the job done, and use the Synology NFS mount for storage.
- Exactly. It's plenty useful for Network-Attached-Storage. That's what it's built for.
  Your network needs are a bit over the top, but maybe consider the Minisforum MS-01. Small form factor, i5 or i9, up to 96G. RAM, and 2x SFP, and some low profile PCIE space if needed in the future. This is WAY more than you need for your service needs, and you can just expand your Synology disks for extra storage super easily. Saves money, and solves your problems without needing a full rack-sized server.
  
  Thank you so much! After searching it up online, the Minisforum MS-01 seems to check off every box I'd had when I went looking.
  I'll look around to see if there is anything more suited, but for now, it seems like what I'll end up going with.
- Second this suggestion. I run a synology NAS as well and it works great for that. My applications run on another box that mounts storage via NFS.

Some good ideas on this site if you are interested in building your own https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/guide-nas-killer-6-0-ddr4-is-finally-cheap/13956
- Ha I came here to suggest the nas killer too. I built the nas killer 3 and it’s been running great for years.
- Thank you! I'll check it out, it seems to have quite a few good suggestions.
  
  I was going to post the same link, I generally take inspiration from that forum and then adapt with what I can find on eBay etc for cheap. The prices they give are for US eBay and not always suitable to EU eBay.
  I’ve just finished my new NAS using Unraid OS and some info from the forum.
  Jonsbo N3 case
  Gigabyte Z590i Vision D motherboard
  Intel i5 10400T
  2x16Gb DDR4 2666 (basic corsair)
  LSI 9207-8i HBA in IT-Mode
  An old 128Gb M2 SSD
  8x6Tb HGST SAS drives
  Corsair SF600 PSU
  It took me more than 6 months to find all the parts at a correct price but I was not in a rush.
  It’s 2.5Gbe and not 10Gb SFP but you get the idea. The cost was really low (lower than 1000) because I already had the HDDs from an older server. It should be around 1500€ max with the disks.
  The real downside of doing that is the time it takes but it’s also a kind of pleasure to hunt for parts and one day assemble them all.
  
  I’ve been considering moving to this build in particular for lower power usage and heat output, but they have some other dual socket builds if you want more cpu power.

No one has brought up Unraid OS specifically yet. Others have said just build your own machine, and yes absolutely this is the way. And then just slap Unraid on that and you have yourself exactly what you're looking for. It's user friendly, as powerful as your wallet can handle, and plenty of room for expandability.
- TrueNAS if you're on a budget

My solution to this question a year or so ago was to take my gaming desktop, which was collecting dust after I moved to my gaming laptop, and gut it down to a 4U server rack case. Best decision I've ever made. 12 core Ryzen and 128gb memory. Got a 10g adapter in the pci express, 8xHDD for data and then 2 mirrored nvme for the OS itself. Only thing I kept out was the video card since I had no use for it (yet)
An equivalent "server" on the market would probably cost a fortune and cost you a ridiculous amount of electricity.

Rack mount server class machines at home generally aren't great options. Definitely stick with tower/mini designs.
That said, for a home server a general workstation may be best. I personally have a System 76 Thelio. I added a second drive and installed proxmox with a ZFS mirrored pool.
https://system76.com/desktops
- I disagree! They can be great options, inexpensive and reliable. My current home server is a Dell r620 with xeon CPUs, 64gbs of RAM, and 2 terabytes storage in raid 5. It serves several vms, a mix of Windows and Linux. More than enough for many home set ups. Boots the os off a 16gb flash card. Cost me $185. Thing has been a tank.
  I bought two short L brackets from home Depot, and have it hanging flat against the wall. It's been fabulous.
  
  I just went with a sliger case and shoved my old gaming mobo in there and with my router and everything else in a rack it's nice to keep everything quiet and not that hot. I think rack mount is the way to go, before that I just had a table with things all over

If you don't need enterprise level hardware and support, I can suggest MinisForum. They released the MS01 fairly recently and I believe it fits your specs.
https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01
- Yeah, the Minisforum Ms-01 was suggested a lot, and as far as I can tell, its nearly perfect. After reading thtough the comments on this post, I'm planning on buying one or two on a few months.
  I'm a bit concerned about the risks associated with having storage and compute on the same device, but I can always get a regular nas for storage later.
  
  If you buy three of them you can set up a Ceph cluster I suppose ahah. That would solve part of your issue of having storage and compute on the same node.

Lots of good suggestions here
I'm a bit surprised by your budget. For something just running plex and next cloud, you shouldn't need a 6 or even 3k system. I run my server on found parts, adding up to just $600-$700 dollars including (used) SAS drives. It runs probably a dozen docker containers, a dns server, and homeassistant. I don't even remember what cpu I have because it was such a small consideration when I was finding parts.
I'd recommend keeping g your synology as a simple Nas (maybe next cloud too, depending on how you're using it) and then get a second box with whatever you need for plex. Unless you're transcoding multiple 4k videos at once, your cpu/GPU really don't need much power. I don't even have a dedicated GPU in mine, but I'm basically unable to do live 4k transcodes (this is fine for me)
- To be fair, the budget isn't so much a question of "how much I have", but rather a question of "how long am I willing to save up"
  The 3K figure I used in my post was based on the relative price of similar systems I'd found online that "mostly" for the bill of what I was looking for.
  Systems that actually had the kind of CPU I was looking for often ran in the range of 7K, which would take me about two to three years to save up for.
  And while yes, I was looking in the wrong catagory, as far as I can tell they don't sell non-NAS systems. I wasn't able the find a single example of a server designed for CPU tasks until I posted here and was recommended the Minisforum MS-01. Which is, admittedly, overkill in the extreme, but at least I won't have to upgrade for a long while, and I only have to save up for 3 or 4 months to afford it!

- I personally would recommend this n100 to get a real psu which can add many drives, 6 Sata ports and a standard form factor.
  Edit: Also a PCIE Slot to add 10 Gbit Networking Card if dual 2.5gbit is too slow. And if you need more power there is also and i3 n305 variant of these mainboards.
- I was wondering if they were doing CPU transcoding in plex instead of using a client that supports direct playback. A few Apple TVs can generally do the trick at a much lower cost and double as YouTube and other streaming services clients.

I bought a used desktop with 4 SATA ports. Has i5 7th gen and currently 5 TB and an 500GB SSD and has max ram of 64GB. I guess the HDD are not included in the price?
I'm not sure what your software requirements are but if you go the DIY route a desktop works. I made the BIOS auto turn on on power restored and have services start on startup so it gives the server feeling.
Bonus is that you can use it as a gaming server and upgrade the components easily for a while depending on the motherboard.

I made the jump to a full server a few years ago and there's some pretty high limits but you can get them spec'ed pretty low. Something like a dell r730 Single 8 core xenon 32gb ram and a couple tb of storage running 4-500$. They can be upgraded over time to be dual 16 core xenon 1tb ram and petabyte of storage.

I recommend just getting either:
A cheap prebuilt desktop computer, or
Build yourself a computer
It doesn't have to be a "server".

Are you looking at Dell/HP/Lenovo's sites? Don't do that, those are going to be way overpriced and way overkill. Also most of them are rack servers, not really suited to home use. If anything, you'd want to spec it out as a tower workstation.
Personally I build mine out of parts, and usually used parts. Currently I'm using a little U-NAS NS-410 case, and I replaced all the internals with something better. Total cost was less than $400, I think.

For many reasons I would go used. There are used server vendors which have great machines for a reasonable price. You can of course build your own with that money but if you go used you will have a beast which will likely run for decades still.

If this isn't the right community to post this, please let me know, and I'll take it down. I don't want to cause any trouble, I'm just looking for help. I'm really new to this kinda stuff.
- I think this is a fine community, but as a question, is there a reason you aren’t considering building a server? You could fit those requirements into a normal desktop chassis and likely still have some pci slots free for future upgrades.
  
  Mostly, I just don't know much about hardware in general. I'm sure I could follow a tutorial online on how to put it together, but I don't know much about what I'd need to buy in the first place.
  I'll look online and see what I can find though, this does seem like what I'm going to have to do to get the specs I want.
  
  Yep, spec a case to meet the drive needs, then find the motherboard that meets the performance needs.

Tiny/mini/micro makes up my server environment (and two customs using old cases and replaced parts).
Storage is a 1520+ and the two customs, with the 1515+ for backups I don't want to lose (syncs to two other locations).
Tiny/mini/micro is the majority of compute tasks, mostly proxmox, LXC's, and a few VMs.
The little machines have plenty of processing power, usually nvme but I can add it on if needed. Combine it with network storage, and you don't need anything else imo.
Bonus is they are small and cheap as off lease machines being auctioned off.

To be fair the Synology lineup is confusing, but if you get the right model - one with a Ryzen processor and support for 32GB memory (officially; they can take more) - then you've got yourself a proper little workhorse with low power consumption, a stable, reliable OS, and super easy expansion thanks to the hot-swap drive bays and their Hybrid RAID option. My 8 bay model is running a couple of full-blown VMs and what must be two dozen or so docker containers while barely breaking a sweat. The DS723+ is the equivalent 2 bay model.
For things that need some acceleration like Plex and Immich I've added a little N100 box (a Beelink S12 Pro) with Ubuntu Server and another Docker instance, and mounted the NAS storage via SMB. This also sips power even when transcoding 4x Plex streams at once.
All of which is to say you don't need to do a complex, potentially power hungry and difficult to expand self build to do what you want.

I had an Intel s2600 with dual Xeon and 120 gigs of RAM. It seems like such a good idea to run that as a home server. However, the amount of power that it used because it was older was way too much.
I ended up hunting on eBay and found an old Asus motherboard, Intel chip, ram, and a pny Nvidia card.
I bought refurb hard drives from serverpartdeals and a new case from Amazon.
I recommend starting with a chassis you want and working backwards to help narrow your scope.
I know you wanted smaller but heres what I bought. SilverStone Technology CS382... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKTYSZV9?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
Also, I run truenas scale with a bunch of apps. Ssd z1 for os. Ssd z1 for transcode and caches. And then 4 drive set for main storage and another 4 drive set for backup of the first set.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
LXC	Linux Containers
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
NFS	Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency
NUC	Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
NVMe	Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
PSU	Power Supply Unit
Plex	Brand of media server package
RAID	Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
SATA	Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SMB	Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native
SSD	Solid State Drive mass storage
ZFS	Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

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Good bot.

I'm very happy with my ASRock N100 (either m or DC). It has sufficient performance for my needs (proxmox with opnsense, jellyfin and various other services) while using very little power

Maybe building one yourself might be a good idea. I found someone's old desktop with an 8th Gen i7, 32gb of ram, mobo and Gtx 1070 gpu on the side of the road while on a road trip. Thing was sitting in the rain and slightly rusted, but when I cleaned off the corrosion, stuffed it full of hdds and set it up with truenas scale it's been running flawlessly with an uptime of almost a year. Been running like that for about 5 years now with the occasional maintenance.

I'm reusing a blade server I managed to snag from a company I worked for in 2008. It's perfect as a media server for friends and family. It is only recently degrading slightly but hey, it lasted a long time!
Point is you can use almost anything. Do your homework on compatible parts and make what you can afford
- I believe you may have missed read the post or not at all.

I would suggest looking into TiniMiniMicro used PC and let NAS do NAS things. Try to get a PC with decent number of thread and put as much RAM as it supports. Install ProxMox on it and go nuts. Learn Linux TV has a great series of videos on it.

58 comments