Selfhosted

40313 readers

301 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world

HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz

Help for getting started with hardware (self.selfhosted)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by theorangeninja to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Some foundational questions:

budget?
rough desired capacity?
desired level of resiliency?

[–] theorangeninja 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Alright, 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. And I have a tight budget.

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).

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I would recommend:

go on eBay and find some sort of cheap Lenovo/dell/hp thin client for your secondary node. You can find workable 1L-class boxes for around $100. You can get away with some of the older m700/710/900/910 tiny models, but the extensibility of the m720/920 tiny models is going to be much better.
for your primary, I think you’d probably be best off finding an old server tower with 8 3.5” bays - if you’re lucky and on-the-ball, you may be able to snipe something like this, but shipping is of course going to be a bitch. An alternative is to pick up another one of those thin clients (making sure it’s a model with USB3, but preferably 3.1 or 3.2 whatever the gen is (side note: fuck anyone involved with the USB versioning scheme, because it’s absolutely indecipherable) that can actually support meaningful data transfer, and then just find a cheap DAS and connect it to that node.

[–] theorangeninja 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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 and then find a cheap enclosure to use as a custom DAS solution.

[–] theorangeninja 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

No, for 2 reasons:

You will have better luck with a full-fledged PCIE HBA from ebay
that won’t fit with how the chassis is designed (at least on the “tiny” model - I’ve no experience with the larger SFF model). It’s on the underside too, so just leaving part of the cover off is not an option.

[–] theorangeninja 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Thank you very much, you saved me money and hassle!

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago

No worries. Cheers, and good luck finding a system to suit your needs!