Comment on I want to build a Mini ITX PC for my home server, where do I start?
just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Can’t do a full build for that amount. Just get a MiniPC. Check out Minisforum’s Refurb listings. Dirt cheap, and come with a warranty. Better hurry though…
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Main issue is drives. If your data is modest, multiple NVMe drives could be affordable, but if you have lots of data, you’ll want HDDs, and those won’t fit. Make sure you actually want a miniPC down the line before buying.
sxan@midwest.social 1 week ago
How much is “limited?” I’ve got one of those AMD Ryzen mobile CPU jobs that I bought new, from Amazon, for $300. I added a 2TB M.2 drive for another $100. For a bit over $200 ($230?) you can get a 4TB M.2 NVMe.
And that’s for fast storage. There’s USB3 A and C ports, so nearly unlimited external - slower, but still faster than your WiFi - drives.
When bcachefs is reliable, it’s got staged multi-device caching for the stuff you’re actually using, and background writing to your slower drives. I’m really looking forward to that, but TBH I have all of our media on a USB3 SSD it’s plenty fast enough to stream videos and music from.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Yeah, I really don’t know what constraints OP is working under. Here are mine:
If I was building today, I’d probably still go HDD because few mobos have >2 NVMe slots, and NVMe gets expensive at higher capacities, especially if RAID is on the table.
If my NAS was 100% backed up, I wouldn’t need RAID and I would probably use NVMe to save on space and complexity.
Why tho? Just use btrfs or zfs, they’re proven in production, and have a lot of good documentation.
sxan@midwest.social 1 week ago
Shit, that’s a lot of storage. K.
I’ve lived on btrfs for years. I love the filesystem. However, RAID had been unreliable for a decade now, with no indication that it will ever be fixed; but most importantly, neither btrfs not zfs have prioritized multi-device support, and bcachefs does.
You can configure a filesystem built from an SSD, a hard drive, and a USB drive, and configure it so that writes and reads go to the SSD first, and are eventually replicated to the hard drive, and eventually eventually to the USB drive. All behind the scenes, so you’re working at SSD speeds for R/W, even if the USB hasn’t yet gotten all of the changes. With btrfs and zfs, you’re working at the speed of the slowest device in your multi-device FS; with bcachefs, you work at the speed of the fastest.
There’s a lot in there I don’t know about yet, like: can it be configured s.t. the fastest is an LRU? But from what I read, it’s designed very similar to L1/L2 cache and main memory.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 week ago
4-bay USB4 enclosure is $60. It’ll do fine.
cmeu@lemmy.world 1 week ago
This all day. USB3 has plenty of bandwidth to keep those spinners busy, and a cheap pc can be bought for under $200 that would handle all the services op described, plus more.
I bought an n150 with 12gb RAM, dual 2.5gb nic, built in name and USB 3.2. it uses like 15w of power, is basically silent, and with a 5 bay HDD attached I’ve got enough storage for whatever.
Building a home lab server from components is only a good idea if you have some really specific use case not covered by cheap imports…
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
How reliable are those though? The ones I’ve looked at have really crappy controllers.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They don’t have controllers. They present as JBOD. Great for software RAID, btrfs, ZFS…etc.