I’m trying to get into Homelabbing, but it’s felt very confusing, mostly because it feels like I need to have some kind of high speck system, which probably isn’t the most true but it’s what it feels like.
In descending order of importance, I primarily want a NAS that I, and my family (My Dad is a Photographer and I do Drone photography and mapping), can use to get away from cloud subscription (Google Drive). That I can use to host a VPN so I can connect to my home network and my home PC when I’m travelling, self hosting apps like OpenDrone Maps, and that I can use to start experimenting with sandboxes and Linux environments, as well as programming environments that I don’t necessarily want to be testing on my primary computer.
I’ve thought about building a new micro/mini-PC, or buying a NAS Box from Ugreen or Ubiquity. Even though it’s usually the most cost effective option, I always get nervous about buying used computer parts because I don’t know what they’ve been used for or where they came from.
I suppose that what I’m asking is whether I can get away with ‘just’ a prebuilt NAS (Like the UGreen DH4300 Plus), or if people would recommend that I should go with something more custom.
Sky’s the limit with this question. A built NAS will generally be better than a preconfigured one for home use because it can grow with you.
With TrueNAS you’ll basically be paying for the hardware based on your needs. Most desktop motherboards will give you 4-8x SATA ports, 1-2 NVMe ports, and up to 16x pcie (can split to two 8x pcie port) and maybe an 1x-4x pcie additional port. 16i HBA addon cards will generally only need 8x pcie 3.0 and a single 10GbE will need 4x pcie 3.0.
You don’t necessarily need ECC RAM though it’s highly recommended. My first TrueNAS Core build used an old Hero Asus x370 AM4 Ryzen 1700 setup with 64 GB of non ECC RAM and it ran great for my needs.
NAS will use up how ever much RAM you have available, so decide how much you’ll need. Start with 32GB or more, then decide how much storage space you want with either HDD, SSD, NVMe, or a mix. Number of disk and redundancy, 3-4 disk using raidz1, 5-10 disk using raidz2 generally. The raidz# counts the number of redundancy disk you have of failures before you can lose the entire pool. Raidz2 mean you can lose 2 disk and still operate. It also means -2 disk from storage capacity. More disk in the pool will equate to better sequential read/writes in a Raidz setup.
TrueNAS allows VMs and LXC Containers, though they are not as good as a dedicated hypervisor like Proxmox.
Major hurdles you’ll face right now cost wise will be RAM & storage (HDD, SSD, NVMe).
This is a big subject matter, but it can be planned around budget and need.
A used Dell/HP that’s relatively recent would be more than enough compute wise. If you want to go full DiY then you can always find used CPU, motherboard, and put them in a case.
But the biggest problem will be storage prices atm. And how much effort/work you want to put into it. If you just want to plug it in and go then ugreen/ubiquiti will be your best bet.
So going back an rereading you post. I’m under the impression that you are wanting to use this device for actual work. If this is true, then I’d very much recommend going the prebuilt route for your “production” work and then getting a second hand cheap PC for testing/learning how to DiY stuff and build up your skill set to host non-critical workloads.
For your critical data it will behoove you to setup an off site backup for any critical data. I recommend using something like Duplicacy with an S3 compatabile backup, I currently recommend giving backblaze b2 a look as they have very competitive prices. Just make sure to fully document every setting you make within the backup service you decide to go with to save yourself from future pain.
Also welcome to the forums! Feel free to ask any other questions you may have. I know this all can be a lot to take in initially.
That’s a solid plan, and actually what I’m doing here also. I have a QNAP box which I wiped the stock OS on and replaced it with truenas, and then got a potato-class used Dell optiplex I think for $150-ish as a replication target. That’s a little more DIY than using a pre-built NAS actually as a pre-built NAS, but something like that plus some cloud storage or a buddy box you can remote into should cover your bases without causing excessive damage to your wallet.
You should try to keep things a bit separate, you don’t need one “God Box" that does everything, especially for homelab because if/ when something goes wrong it takes everything out with it. Better to have a NAS do mostly just NAS things, then a mini pc or similar kinda basic few generations old business machine for homelab tinkering.
I have a few consumer hardware built TrueNAS boxes, and a uGreen DXP4800 Plus with 10gigabit ethernet and 4 hdds. I have been impressed with the ease of use and remote access/ management of the uGreen, no stability issues or any problems at all. You should absolutely have a $200-300 UPS powering your modem, router & NAS if you are going to have any sort of important data going to or from the NAS. Any truly important data should have at least 1 more point of backup like an external HDD you manually backup to, or another NAS of some kind with automated backup of at least some folders on the NAS.
I would strongly recommend at least getting a 2.5gigabit switch, a few 2.5gbe network cards or usb adapters and a NAS with 2.5 or 10gbe so you can have faster local transfers. 2.5 is really pretty affordable compared to 10gbe, and about 250MB/s is a lot better than around 100MB/s of regular 1gigabit ethernet, not quite as good as about 1GB/s of 10gigabit but that option isn’t cheap.
As others have mentioned I recommend letting the NAS do the storage, and have another machine do other things. You can do a NAS on a mid tower case, to the sky like me running a Xeon Platinum 8260 512GB Ram and DS460c disk shelf with various 6/8/16/20 tb sas drives both hot and cold spares. It is a huge power draw though.
A jonsbro N6/5 with a spare motherboard, cpu and ram. If you want to learn run Debian and do ZFS yourself or do TrueNAS CE if you want to deal with none of that.
Make sure you do the 3-2-1 backup rule as drives will fail and you can run RaidZ2 (or 1) depending on the number of drives eventually you will have a failure.
I do not think you need anything bigger then 1gbit unless there are multiple people wanting to use and stream at blue ray quality. Probably not needed and if it is you can get a decent switch and tinker with LAGs so that the connections are split over multiple connections.
UPS is a must line interactive or double online your choice put the NAS on that.
Hi Everyone, thanks for the warm welcome! And thanks so much for all the responses I really appreciate all of the insight!
I should have written it more clearly in the main post I suppose, I’m more looking to use it for personal projects and self-education at the moment. But I won’t rule out doing more professional level work in the eventual future, especially as I get more and more familiar with Drones and GIS Modeling, etc.
Based on what I’m seeing it seems like people seem to recommend starting with a NAS box and expanding from there. I do want the NAS to at least be able to host a VPN, whether I’m using the native software or installing something like TrueNAS or ProxMox, so I can remotely connect to the network drives. I’m definitly leaning more towards a UGreen DH4300 or DH4800, but I’m going to do a little more research and sleep on it I think.
Thanks again for all your helpful comments everyone!
I’m going to be contrarian here and say that if your goal is homelab-tinkering & personal NAS & simple VM host, and you don’t have strict requirements on uptime, a single computer can be optimal - but do run your router on separate HW so that your internet connection stays up when you do server maintenance.
If things were sane I’d recommend something similar to what I’m running: a ProArt B550-CREATOR motherboard (PCIe bifurcation of CPU lanes, 2x 2.5 Gbit/s NICs, ECC support), a Ryzen Pro APU (e.g. 4650G/5650G/5655G) (for ECC support), and 32-64 GiB of ECC UDIMMs. But good luck finding the RAM (or the CPU) now at any sort of reasonable price, if at all.
The most glaring issue with the above: only 4 SATA ports. But you do have a bunch of PCIe slots for either PCIe x1 SATA cards or maybe an HBA in one of the wider slots.
The luxury option? An Epyc 8005 system (32 native SATA channels and more PCIe lanes than you can shake a stick at). But again, good luck getting the RAM.
Honestly, if I had to start over from scratch today, I’m not sure what I would do. Probably the wise thing is to figure out storage first! Can you get flash storage? If so, SATA or NVMe? What HDDs can you get - you’ll need very different systems to support a fleet of old, smaller drives compared to, say, a couple of mirrored 30 TB ones.
Oh, and also, for a small homelab/personal NAS like this, I feel that a UPS is probably a bad idea, at least if you are in a city with reliable power. I’ve been using computers since the 286 era, and I’ve never had anything destroyed by bad power. It’s probably more likely that the UPS fails and destroys something than for the mains to fry something here. Depends on location, of course.
