Yo.
I’m new to the game. Like 2h fresh. I’m fairly technical, being a millennial and a programmer.
What I want to do, is to have a NAS server I can host movies from and watch them on my phone in my bed - or on my projector.
Extra points if I could host my ebooks and music there and run a torrent client. Extra extra points if I could connect to it from outside my home network (and stream)
I’ve read about about Plex and Jellyfin.
I’m here to ask you about hardware advice.
Will QNAP or Synology be enough for my needs and can I install custom software there? I don’t really want to create hardware from scratch.
Google says yes, but I trust reddit and random articles like I trust a fox not to eat chickens.
Edit: preferably something with WOL that goes silent and fanless when not in use, or something I can shut down with a button
Edit: thanks everyone, right now I’m thinking of using GMKTec or QNAP and am comparing options, prices and number of issues people have on the internet. I’m not a hobbyist and the less I have to work on it the better.
Edit: I’ve ordered GMKTec NucBox G3 Plus 16 GB 1T for 195$ from their site as my starter kit. Should work for my needs.
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(Alternative below) Buy 5 - 7 years old computer with decent specs (i5 i7, 16 gigs ram, don’t care about hard drives but prefer ones with ssd) for about 60 - 100 bucks. Buy 250 gigz+ ssd (if it’s not included) and any desired number and sizes of nas grade drives (this is where you don’t want to save money if you want this full fledged nas). Don’t forget UPS! Install TrueNAS. Profit… Ok not profit but enjoy. For movies definitely jellyfin (keep your distance from plex really). Audiobookshelf for audiobooks but also ebooks! Amazing software that one.
Alt. Buy raspberry pi, two usb hard drives, install open media vault and same apps as above. Setup data duplication from one drive to the second one with rsync (directly in omv ui). Omv is not as polished as true nas but its cheap and it lets you dip your feet in homelabbing first, in two to three years you will gain experience and vision to do your dream homelab (or at last try 😀) if the pi is not enough.
Will QNAP or Synology be enough for my needs and can I install custom software there?
Probably? Most likely yes, today. Next week 2 month / year when you decide to run something else or more, not so much.
I don’t really want to create hardware from scratch.
A desktop running NAS like software will work.
From another comment from op
I don’t want to hear the fans
You put a NAS under load and you’re gonna a hear fans.
I want something that turns on and off as necessary.
Run enough things on your NAS and it’ll never have the time to turn off.
Fanleas cases, no fan, no noise. https://www.monsterlabo.com/
Sure, at an obscene price.
I got lucky and picked one up for $200
I got lucky and picked one up for $200
Thank you.
Next week 2 month / year when you decide to run something else or more, not so much.
Could you maybe give me an example of what that could be? I might be not knowledgeable enough about what I could do with it.
I don’t want to hear the fans
To be precise, only when not in use. When it’s working then yeah, its gonna cool down somehow.
I have an always-on 2020-ish corporate desktop with TrueNAS. When idling, that thing is silent. I have to look at LEDs to make sure it’s running.
You said it yourself.
Extra points if I could host my ebooks and music there and run a torrent client. Extra extra points if I could connect to it from outside my home network (and stream)
To start, if you’re using it to torrent your media then you’re going to want it running in the background because you need to seed your torrents. Aside from it being the right thing to do, keeping a good ratio is necessary to get into good private trackers. And torrents aren’t great for music, at least not in my experience, so you’ll probably want soulseek as well. That also requires sharing in the background. You could buy a seedbox and torrent through that, but if you were going to go that route you could just do everything you’re trying to do through a seedbox instead of getting a NAS, and it wouldn’t take long for the subscription costs to surpass the costs of self hosting.
So now you’ve got qbittorrent, soulseek, Plex, and Kavita or similar for ebooks. What else could you want over time? Do you want to host audiobooks, too? Comics/manga/magazines? Maybe you want to streamline and automate the downloading process. Maybe your mom can’t stream her favorite show anymore so you decide to share your library with her. Maybe you want to be able to search and download anything from any device anywhere, and maybe you want your mom to be able to as well.
Why stop there. Maybe you want to self host your own file and picture cloud storage as well. Maybe Mom’s, too. Maybe you want to start blocking ads on your network at a DNS level. Maybe you want your phone to use your home network even when you’re out and about. The possibilities increase exponentially once you start getting into self hosting.
I don’t want to hear the fans
That being said I have a good number of the above tasks running on an HP elitedesk mini g9 and it stays pretty quiet. The spinning disks make noise though lol
Edit: After reading through the rest of the replies I understand your situation a bit more. I see you don’t want to build something or run it on your current desktop. It’s hard to tell you which way to go without knowing at least your current budget and storage expectations. Because you can get a Synology and it will work out of the box for your needs right now, as someone said, but, you will be throwing money away that could better go towards more storage or compute, and in the end you’re limited to their walled garden. As someone else said, you’d be much better off with TrueNAS as your OS. It all depends how much time, energy and money you’re willing to throw at the problem. That is to say, are you looking for a hobby or are you looking for a solution? In any case, installing Plex on your desktop is the easiest and most common first step. You can set up a small library and test it out, see how loud it gets and how much power it draws if that’s your concern. You will be streaming media to your bed by bedtime. Learn how to use it, then when you figure out your next steps it is easy enough to migrate, or just start over with the wisdom you’ve gained along the way. And YouTube is a good enough resource for this. There’s a variety of steb-by-step NAS builds. And though there are definitely guys on there that don’t know what they’re talking about, if you watch enough NAS building videos you’ll catch on quick enough to the necessary components. Anyway hope that helps.
Thank you for articulating what I was trying to get at with OP.
Thank you~!
I want to spend as little time on it as I can. Then I’d like to minimize the initial cost of it, or at least cost of exploitation.
I’m fairly busy with my hobbies (Lego and Arkham Horror LCG), so I’m looking for the solution. I’d rather spend more money than more time.
On the other hand, if I waste money on garbage I’m going to be cross and do it from the scratch again, so I’m trying to hedge my options before I commit - if that makes sense.
Well like I said you can start running servers right now for free with your desktop. Then your best bet is in my opinion going to be buying a NUC, Elitedesk, or another smaller form factor PC, this will save you on energy costs and noise, and flashing truenas to it (Or you can run everything you need to in Windows or Linux or containers if that’s what you’re comfortable with) and using either external hard drives or getting a hard drive array and using that to store everything. This is going to cost more than a Synology and takes a little setting up but it’s infinitely expandable and will suit your needs whatever they become. And don’t forget the 3-2-1 rule of backups. These rules are written in blood. And RAID is not a backup, I learned that one the hard way, myself.
Yes. Synology will do this fine. They’ve been cunty recently so I recommend QNap.
I recommend adding Tailscale for remote access.
I conveniently was given a Synology ds412 by Amazon many years ago (and being as I had just been fired from the phone job with them due to a “mistake” in hiring me, I figured I’d keep it. Also learned that when you work security, don’t piss off secretaries while doing the job, even as a contractor). I still use it. Not powerful, but it serves up most video alright, and is ok as a download space.
If you have a desktop, throw a hard drive or two in it and you have a NAS. Software (like you mentioned Plex or Jellyfin) does the rest. Even if you only have a laptop, a hard drive in a standard USB enclosure will perform this role just fine.
Thank you, but I don’t want to keep my desktop running. The cooling noise, the electricity. Did I mentioned the fans? They are quiet but I can hear them, I want something that goes silent and wakes up when needed.
There are some passively cooled (i.e. no spinning fan) SFF Desktops (HP, DELL, etc.) or you could get a Raspberry Pi 5 and stick it into a Geekworm case. Power consumption with these devices should hover around 5W, maybe slightly higher under load. The Desktops most probably support WoL. The Raspberry Pi doesn’t.
A note on the fans specifically, you can buy quiet fans. In general, the larger the fan, the lower the speed you can run it and the quieter it is. You can also setup fan curves so they are only doing anything of note when the computer is pumping out heat (given your statements, that would be basically never).
The electricity usage is a pretty notable thing. Though, if you take the graphics card out of a desktop (use integrated graphics, a dedicated graphics card in a server is just wasted electricity) and set the OS to power saver (this mostly means it won’t boost the CPU to higher clocks), it really won’t use much power. Compared to buying dedicated NAS hardware, you may never recoup the energy costs between the hardware you have and the lower-power hardware you need to buy.
If you don’t already own one, a Kill-A-Watt is a great tool to have. Tells you how much energy a device is using. Biggest thing I found was my TV had a vampire draw of 15W. Literally draws 15W while off. This got the TV put on a power strip I turn off when I’m not using it.
Now, with all that said, sometimes you just want what you want. And there is nothing wrong with that. My goal here is to make sure you don’t feel you have to pick one option over the other.
Damn 15w is huge! What’s the brand? Does it have smart (WiFi) power on? Does it help if you switch it off?
It’s a very old 1080p Sharp TV. I know it does have WiFi which I have not setup, but that certainly doesn’t mean the WiFi is off.
I’ll have to see if there is some way to disable the WiFi completely and re-measure it.
Silent and fanless: look for a Monsterlabo case. It is all heatsink. Buy a fankess power supply, or buy a PSU that is overrates for the load and fanless under 30% load.
Its the setup I have. I can render video and other work loads and you don’t even know the system is on
I got an Aoostar WTR Pro for this exact purpose. I went with jellyfin over plex due to plex enshittification, haven’t had any issues yet. You can find smaller NAS devices if you want. I avoided Synology because something felt off, and now they’re enshittifying too.
I like the people suggesting to build your own, that’s my next plan.
So what you can do hardware wise is either any usff pc with 2 drives (used Lenovo’s are fairly popular), or diy build with an Intel n150 board and some drives. Both are usually very silent since they don’t have active cooling. If you spend the money for ssd’s then it’s completely silent.
Wouldn’t go with off the shelf nas, since it’s a trend to move more and more behind subscriptions and you never know how long you’ll have a feature.
For Software:
I’d definitely go with jellyfin. Plex is commercializing hard.
Remote access is easy and secure with tailscale
For ebooks calibre-web
Music and torrent i don’t know enough to suggest anything
Base system maybe some truenas and all services as containers
I collected this data from another thread that might be useful: https://lemmy.ml/post/30234916
| Type | Name | Extra | User | |--------+------------------------+-----------------+--------------------------------| | MiniPC | ASUS 4-Bay | | Zikeji@programming.dev | | MiniPC | HP Microserver | | wingsfortheirsmiles@feddit.uk | | MiniPC | HP microserver | Homelab | JoeKrogan@lemmy.world | | MiniPC | HTPC | Nobara | BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world | | MiniPC | ITX NAS | Unraid | Skunk@jlai.lu | | MiniPC | Jonsbo N4 Case | | stoy@lemmy.zip | | MiniPC | Minisforum X1 pro | OpenSuSe | Skunk@jlai.lu | | MiniPC | ODROID H4+ mini pc | | Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social | | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 1B | Photoframe | JoeKrogan@lemmy.world | | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 3 | PiHole | gigachad@sh.itjust.works | | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 3A | | stoy@lemmy.zip | | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 3B | | stoy@lemmy.zip | | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 3B | | stoy@lemmy.zip | | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 3B | Kodi | JoeKrogan@lemmy.world | | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 3B | Kodi | JoeKrogan@lemmy.world | | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 4 | OpenSuSe/Docker | Skunk@jlai.lu | | MiniPC | RaspberryPi 5 | RpiOS | BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world | | Server | HP ProLiant DL360 Gen9 | | Lucy@feddit.org | | Server | HP Z440 Workstation | | Lucy@feddit.org |Edit: well fuck me for trying to help…
Thanks dude. I’m not sure what I’m looking at though. As I mentioned in the top post, I’m new to this and it’s not my hobby.
You listed hardware, but gave no context how good it is for my needs - I think that’s why you got downvoted.
ah no worries, I was just surprised by it. Yeah it’s a hardware list for NAS/MiniPC/selfhosting as vetted by other Lemmy users