I dived into the selfhosting rabbit hole once again and again I am stuck at the hardware part. I’d like to start small-ish to make it realisable. I thought about a NAS (Openmediavault probably). First I wanted to do it on a Raspberry Pi with an external hard-drive but then I read USB connected drives are unreliable and so on. Mini PCs are too small to house internal drives so should I go with a (refurbished) business PC from ebay and add some drives to it?But they usually come with Windows 10, which I wouldn’t need but makes them more expensive. I also have at least one old PC case laying around but no mainboard or CPU for it, if that info might be important. Thank you in advance for helping a noob out!
Edit: What I want to achieve: I would like a NAS and (separated) a server with some small services (pi-hole or adguard, syncthing, jellyfin (getting the data from the NAS), and so on). I thought about running the small services with docker on a RPi 4 and the NAS on a refurbished business PC with SATA drives in the case (I checked ebay and there are mainboards with 4 SATA III connectors and PCI so I could even add more SATA connectors). In a second moment a backup server (maybe with borg) would be a good idea but I could also do manual backups with an external USB HDD for the time being.
This describes what I’d like to do. Budget is low and I don’t have a lot of hardware laying around. For the capacity I don’t know yet but for sure 6tb to start with. I’d like to try RAID (heard a lot, never tried it yet) and another backup (maybe something for the future).
I would recommend:
Thank you very much! Can you elaborate on why m720/920 have a better extensibilty? And what would be a resonable data transfer rate for a DAS?
They support NVMe and have a PCIE riser; if you get the little adapter from Lenovo’s proprietary slot to standard PCIE, you can run it as a nic, or get an [HBA with external SFF-8008 ports](https://www.ebay.com/itm/284847250980] and then find a cheap enclosure to use as a custom DAS solution.
Hello, sorry to bother again but I have a question. Do you think adding a M.2 card with six SATA3 connectors to a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q would work? I found a M910q for 50 bucks, quite cheap I’d say and the expansion card is around 30 bucks.
No, for 2 reasons:
Thank you very much, you saved me money and hassle!
No worries. Cheers, and good luck finding a system to suit your needs!