And as usual everyone is saying NAS, but talking about servers with a built in NAS.
I’m not saying you can’t run your services on the same machine as your NAS, I’m just confused why every time there’s a conversation about NASs it’s always about what software it can run.
I started my media server in 2020 with an e-wasted i7 3770 dell tower I snagged out of the ewaste pile. Ran jellyfin, audiobookbay, navidrome, calibre-web and an arr stack with about a dozen users like a champ. Old hardware rules if you don’t use windows
And of course I see this after I bought (and received) a miniPC. Picked up a"beefier" n305 unit with 16GB and a 256GB NVMe, as I wanted some headroom in case I have loftier goals. So far have have horrible luck with it in the first 3-4 hours of attempting install of some Linux flavor. Started with Proxmox, as I want to run LXCs and containers of HA, PiHole, and Jellyfin, and there are some boots where I can’t even get past the installer. Booted up a LiveISO of Mint, and even that froze after a few minutes. Reading around about possible NIC driver issues, C-states, temperature throttling, etc… and what a headache so far. I can’t be sure it’s the device, me, or the images. /vent
Highly doubt it’s worth it in the long run due to electricity costs alone
Depends.
Toss the GPU/wifi, disable audio, throttle the processor a ton, and set the OS to power saving, and old PCs can be shockingly efficient.
You can slow the RAM down too. You don’t need XMP enabled if you’re just using the PC as a NAS. It can be quite power hungry.
Eh, older RAM doesn’t use much. If it runs close to stock voltage, maybe just set it at stock voltage and bump the speed down a notch, then you get a nice task energy gain from the performance boost.
There was a post a while back of someone trying to eek every single watt out of their computer. Disabling XMP and running the ram at the slowest speed possible saved like 3 watts I think. An impressive savings, but at the cost of HORRIBLE CPU performance. But you do actually need at least a little bit of grunt for a nas.
At work we have some of those atom based NASes and the combination of lack of CPU, and horrendous single channel ram speeds makes them absolutely crawl. One HDD on its own performs the same as this raid 10 array.
Yeah.
In general, ‘big’ CPUs have an advantage because they can run at much, much lower clockspeeds than atoms, yet still be way faster. There are a few exceptions, like Ryzen 3000+ (excluding APUs), which idle notoriously hot thanks to the multi-die setup.
I’m still running a 480 that doubles as a space heater (I’m not even joking; I increase the load based on ambient temps during winter)
A 486, eh?
I am assuming that’s a GTX 480 and not an RX 480; if so - kudos for not having that thing melt the solder off the heatsink by now! 😅
The GTX 480 is efficient by modern standards. If Nvidia could make a cooler that could handle 600 watts in 2010 you can bet your sweet ass that GPU would have used a lot more power.
Well that and if 1000 watt power supplies were common back then.
If they’re gonna buy a nas anyway, how many years to break even?
How about a Raspberry Pi? I’ve got one (Raspberry Pi 400) running my Home Automation setup with a couple USB 3.0 ports. Was thinking there’s gotta be some add-ons for Home Assistant to put some external storage to good use.
Don’t need anything too fancy. Just looking for some on-site backup and maybe some media storage
For backups it will be fine. Same for media storage. But if you want media streaming from the device (like plex) then you’ll want something better.
Yeah, I guess I should have been clear that’s part of what I was thinking (although to be honest I’m mostly a schmuck who pays for a few streaming services and uses that)
What exactly would be the main choking point? Horsepower of the Pi to take that stored file and stream it to the client?
You can use it as a smb server and mount it with your other devices. They have an official addon for it with samba in the name.
My NAS draws about 25w (without drives). Show me an old PC with 6 3.5” drive bays that draws 25w.
At idle or under normal load? Im tempted to get the killawatt out.
Idle. Under load a bit more. It’s a mobile chipset, so it is efficient. Not as powerful as a desktop for sure but totally handles my basic workloads.
I mean… my old PC burns through 50-100W, even at idle and even without a bunch of spinning hard drives. My actual NAS barely breaks that under load with all bays full.
I could scrounge up enough SATA inputs on it to make for a decent NAS if I didn’t care about that, and I could still run a few other services with the spare cycles, but… maybe not the best use of power.
I am genuinely considering turning it into a backup box I turn on under automation to run a backup and then turn off after completion. That’s feasible and would do quite well, as opposed to paying for a dedicated backup unit.
I see what you mean, and I have that (old PC with a bunch of 2.5" HDDs formatted as ZFS).
For me power consumption is more important than performance, so I’m looking for a lower power solution for photo sharing, music collection and backups.
My old PC and laptop are too loud to use for anything really. It‘s unfortunate but the noise is too much.
My old PC locks up every 4 to 48 hours. It would make a terrible NAS.
My pc did that when my almost 10 year old SSD with my OS started to die. Switched it out and haven’t had an issue since.
Better to build it from scratch, your desktop PC does not have server-grade hardware. No ECC, no IPMI, not enough SATA ports, etc.
Hardware is boring. Doing some research is boring. People don’t care about boring stuff. Or their data.
“Let’s put every single family photo taken between 1976 and today on this and only this one shitty drive. And let me spin up an Immich container on my trusty raspberry. I have watched a YouTube video or two in my days. I think I know what I’m doing.”
Bonus points for “but ssh is all you need”, “static electricity has never been a problem for me” and “what gpu do you recommend for jellyfin?”.
I think the self-hosting community needs to be more honest with itself about separating self hosting from building server hardware at home as separate hobbies.
You absolutely don’t need sever-grade hardware for a home/family server, but I do see building a proper server as a separate activity, kinda like building a ship in a bottle.
That calculation changes a bit if you’re trying to host some publicly available service at home, but even that is a bit of a separate thing unless you’re running a hosting business, at which point it’s not a really a home server anyways, even if it happens to sit inside your house.
You absolutely don’t need sever-grade hardware for a home/family server
Server-grade hardware makes a lot of sense even for home use. My NAS is tucked away in a closet, having IPMI is so much more convenient when you can’t easily hook it up to a keyboard and mouse.
None of that really matters for a home media server. Even the limited SATA ports, worst case you have to grab a cheap expansion card.
Power consumption is a much bigger concern, a purpose built NAS is much more efficient than a random old PC.
Even the most expensive Synology only has space for 8 drives with only one 10Gbit ethernet port.
You can build something yourself for less with much better performance.
HBAs are cheap, IPMI isn’t at all needed under normal uses cases, and ECC is way overkill.
For most people a halfway decent PC that isn’t failing is plenty.
