I haven’t used a desktop in about 5 years, primarly a laptop since new family and old office is now storage…however as I clear it out, plan on converting/updating my office.
That said, looking to build a NAS.
I have been trying to find all what a NAS is capable of other than storage. Is a media server and mail server also a separate thing? I am looking to create my own network and want to ensure I am using the correct terminology to define what I am trying to learn. With Google limiting qty’s of storage, I am thinking of de-googling the family.
That said I still have an old (but new FX8350) in its box. Curious what I can do with it other than loading MX Linus onto the hard drive and repurposing it.
Thanks for your time…any help would be appreciasted.
My home server / NAS runs on my old FX 8320. I run:
variety of webservers
home assistant for home automation
reverse proxy for external access
photoprism for photo management
plex for media streaming
syncthing for file sync
netbootxyz for PXE boot
wikijs personal wiki
baikal caldav/carddav server
wireguard VPN
various samba shares for file storage
I manage most of these services with docker and a docker-compose file. A somewhat recent version of my config is on my github.
To manage storage I have a RAIDZ-1 setup on a pair of 3 TB hard drives. This required a fair amount of RAM, I upgraded it to 32 GB which was pretty cheap as DDR3.
I have no load issues on the system, but that being said I am basically the only person using it.
Steve from Gamers Nexus also has an FX8350 build at home (not as a NAS tho), and I remember him recommending to undervolt the cpu. Just thought I should say that on here.
I ran an FX-6300 for a while and an undervolt can go very, very far. I mostly did it for the noise because I didn’t have the money/means for an aftermarket cooler and the performance jump from a Pentium 4 w/ HDD to an FX-6300 w/ SSD was plenty for me at the time.
So by definition, a NAS is a server just for sharing storage across a network. Anything else means that the server is not just a NAS but is also doing other functions.
It’s kind of pedantic, especially since in practice people will use NAS even if that is not the primary purpose of a server. But hopefully that might help a bit in researching.
Yes, they are separate things software wise, but you could run them on the same physical server as you have the NAS software. Most people running a media server also use the same computer as a NAS.
You are probably looking for the term “self hosting”. That basically means running software yourself, often on your own hardware (or on a rented VPS or rented dedicated server), instead of letting someone else run it on their computer (eg the “cloud”).
On the networking side, another term that might be helpful is “homelab”. Homelab(ing) setting up a personal server or server cluster, and normally a network, normally with a focus of learning about server hardware and software for professional purposes. So I don’t think a homelab quite fits with your goals, but there is plenty of useful information in homelab forums and stuff.
Funny but I just trashed a HomeLab FX8350 ASUS motherboard, CPU and DDR3 RAM because it could not boot from PCIe NVME and of course had no m.2 slot either. I replaced it with a 3400G APU, and an AsRock B350 motherboard that has 2x bootable M.2 slots.
The old FX server ran perfectly fine but was tired. I felt that converting it to a modern TrueNAS system was pissing upwind.
OK to answer your questions … the TrueNAS software suite is what you should look at. It is a solution that replaces RAID with a more modern and more safe method of storage and it can also host VMs, which will then run your services like mail, photo, etc etc. It hosts the services in what are called “Jails” so any intrusion or gross error in 1 “Jail” can not harm the other Jails or your main data storage service.
Just to say some motherboards for the 8350 will boot from PCIe NVMe, I have an ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX R2.0 and I am currently booting from NVMe, on some it just needs a bios update, but check as as jkay said some wont boot from NVMe, although for a multi use server you could run EXSi or Proxmox and have virtual hosts for each task, I believe both can have there OS and boot from a usb stick without issues.