I’m probably in a similar boat thanks to 4x NAS drives (in 2x mirror vdevs so essentially half as power efficient too). I wonder if using an SSD or two for things like caches would help with power draw since you could defer disk usage for longer by relying on a more efficient cache.

SnapRAID is also an option. One benefit is that multiple disks don’t need to be spinning at once to access data. Downside is that your parity isn’t calculated in real time so less data redundancy.

I have two 4TB in Raid 10 (ZFS Mirror) and two 8TB as the same. All in TrueNAS Scale.

TrueNAS is pretty good for a basic setup imo!

A computer. Seriously that’s it. Of course depends on your use case (media servers usually need more than a web host for example)

It’s surprising how slow open source is on replicating Roku. So many manufacturers could be using Linux to bypass androidTV and RokuOS bullshit. I suppose AndroidTV is good enough even despite that.

MergerFS and SnapRAID could be good for you. It’s not immediate parity like with ZFS RAID (You run a regular cronjob to calculate RAID parity) but it supports mismatched drive sizes, expansion of the pool at any time, and some other features that should be good for a media server where live parity isn’t critical.

Proxmox and TrueNAS are nice because they help manage ZFS and other remote management within a nice UI but really you can just use Debian with SSH and do the same stuff. DietPi has a few nice utilities on top of Debian (DDNS manager and CLI fstab utilities, for example)but not super necessary.

Personally I use TrueNAS but I also used DietPi/Debian for years and both have benefits and it really matters what your workflow is. OMV supports everything you want too (incouding SnapRAID) but takes extra setup which put me off.

Docker or LXC containers won’t hurt your performance btw. There’s supposedly some tiny overhead but both are designed to use the basic Linux system as much as possible: they’re way faster than on WSL. For hardware acceleration it’ll be deferred to the GPU for most things and there’s lots of documentation to set it up. The best thing about docker is that every application is kept separate to eachother - updates can be done incrementally and rollbacks are possible too!

Appflowy is a self-hostable notion replacement that’s a bit more mature than this project atm. I hope this can spur some more development away from Notion though, I’m not a fan of the always-online element

rocketchat seems decent

pi zero for streaming is insane not gonna lie. What sort of resolution do you stream it at?

A decently newish phone would blow even a pi 5 out of the water I bet. Modern GPU drivers from snapdragon or mediatek plus core designs that arent 7 years old out of the factory would be a godsend for low-watt homelabbers

my friends complaining that my plex server because I left my phone on the bus and it ran out of charge

Thats a shame. I use Hetzner for my offsite backups because they’re so damn cheap for my usecase.

I’m quite new to docker for NAS stuff - how many pulls would the average person do? like, i don’t think i even have 10 containers 🤨

quicksync should let the i3 handle jellyfin just fine if you’re not going beyond 1080p for a couple of concurrent users. Especially if you configure the Nice values to prefer jellyfin over immich.

I’m not aware of the platform for the n300 because it might be worth the initial setup, and have some room to upgrade the CPU later if it causes trouble.

If OP is going for multiple systems, I’d definitely agree on making one of them a pure NAS and let a more upgradable system run the chunky stuff.

you can, but it’ll be the distilled versions that are significantly less impressive.

https://apxml.com/posts/gpu-requirements-deepseek-r1

Newer versions also introduce memory mapping so they’re technically only bound by your storage capacity (but they’re way slower in practice).

Yeah I’ve given some recommendations but it’s really good to just start small and pick up new stuff as you go, then you can identify your needs and do a big upgrade.

Prowlarr, Sonarr, Radarr.

These services let you find, download, and manage tv shows/movies from multiple trackers. You can even start tracking a tv show that’s still running and it’ll download new seasons as and when they’re released. From there they’re forwarded to your torrent client.

It’s awesome, lets my non-technical GF add movies and tv shows without me, and means we’re up to date on severance!

I’d personally recommend a second hard drive of 500GB at least. You’ll quickly fill that 250gb drive, and it’s good practice to keep your data and applications separate (if the drive fails or gets upgraded your services won’t need to go down!). You can also set up a ZFS pool so you can add drives later into a big pool that’s treated like a single drive by your applications, though most of those services can support multiple storage locations so ZFS isnt too urgent if you expand to a new drive.

I can personally attest that the SU630 is a good SSD though. Serves my raspberry pi well! You don’t need SSDs for your bulk storage though, you won’t need the speed.

Dietpi has an automatic letsencrypt recert service which could probably be ported since its just a whiptail script

ngl the newest truenas version is incomprehensible to me. Makes most of the videos on it obsolete, and the docs aren’t much better, all while trying to abstract docker compose in a way that makes it shit itself when you try to use anything not specifically developed to work with TNS’s storage layout.

It’ll probably improve with time but I clearly picked the worst time to pick it up.

I’ve decided either to return to https://dietpi.com/ or try prox mox and pray it’s more stable.

you can get free dns services via loads of services. I use freedna.afraid.org.

You just add a script to your server’s cronjobs that pings the server with the given info when you set it up and your server will be accessible via its domain name within 24hrs.

There’s loads of tutorials on dynamic dns (ddns) that you can use

Maybe for hosting a blog or something but I wouldn’t self host anything more important than that. Even then, Github pages support custom domains on their free tier so you don’t even need to do the hosting in that scenario

Box64 is amazing. We genuinely might be able to use RISCV desktops within the next few years with a similar performance to leading x86 chips.