If you have an old workstation and drives just around I would recommend looking into unraid.
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Why Unraid in particular? I know it's a paid OS, which makes me wonder why go that route. I think I would rather have a simples SMB share in a linux environment, instead of paying for something like that.
The community documentation is really good; this makes it super easy to find out how to do something or fix an issue. Adding a drive is super easy , and doesn’t require all the drives to be the same size, you can mix and match. It also supports docker on top of all of that. If you’re willing to manage all of that yourself from scratch , then I doubt you’d like it. It’s convenient for most people that don’t want to spend a lot of time managing and troubleshooting their nas.
If the only issue is running out of disk space, why not just buy a larger hard drive to replace the 500GB with?
Also, ECC is always helpful, whether you run truenas or not, but in no way is it a requirement for truenas more than for any other OS. If you want to read more about it, click here for Jim Slater's blog (a fantastic ZFS resource).
Because the Dell 7050 is a micro computer with only a 2.5 HDD slot. I would like to have at least 4.
What about just getting used ATX/mATX MBO for your socket? And any mid/high tower pc case would suit your needs. Not sure can you use PSU from dell, but even if you have to buy one its still cheaper than full pc build
I don't think it would be much cheaper. Because it's a micro PC, with an external power supply, I'd rather keep that one as is and then just buy a new machine.
For example, I saw a Dell Precision T3620 Intel Xeon E3-1245V5 with ECC memory for about 160€, and it looks like it may do the job more than adequately.
Something I'm looking at myself is HP elitedesk 800 gen3 Tower. Mobo has 5 sata ports in addition to 1 nvme port. It takes 6/7th gen cpu so you could reuse your current cpu. 4 ram slots DDR4@2400.
What is especially appealing is the 5.25 slot for which icydock has a powered bracket that takes and powers 4 SSD disks. (Edit: ejectable too). Sure the chassis has internal space to accomodate even more HDD.
With Proxmox on the nvme + some raidz zfs action would make for a nice HCI setup. My next build and might inspire yours.
You can find cheap server chassis in my country for €100 for 2U/3U/4U with plenty of bays since it’s ultimately just a case. There’s plenty of space for any board in the case and you can get mount adapters for desktop boards to mount in server cases. Personally I’d build a bare metal Arch Linux host and run everything as Docker containers running on ZFS RAID-Z but TrueNAS etc is fine if you’re not familiar with building the host yourself. Arch has great documentation for every kind of service you’d want to run on the host.
As of right now, I live in a small studio, so noise is an important factor, forgot to mention that. I thought about server chassis but for them to be cheap enough, they will also be expensive and power hungry. So I was leaning more towards tower builds.