Hardware - Start small and cheap. If you have it already use it. build it out as you need and understand it.
Software (OS) - Debian based perhaps. Docker probarbly.
Utilities - What would you like to do today? pick one, Pihole is useful.
Once you get something working for yourself, you’ll start to build on that knowledge.
Above all be brave and be curious.
Not your scenario really but a HBA will allow you to use SATA and SAS drives. Gives a bit more flexibility on price, especially with 2nd hand SAS drives.
My drives are currently in a box supplied by wires hanging out of the PC (Server!) casing but it would look much neater with a 4 bay hot swap cage built for the purpose.
I just wish I could get the full 12 Gb/s out of the couple of SAS drives I use :o(
You may be out of luck, but doesn’t that board have onboard VGA graphics which you can use?
OMV is a web page dashboard and there’s SSH. What is the usecase for a GPU I wondered?
It needs to be controlled to make a profit. Once something you love becomes popular the bulldozers will move in.
Home network. The most fun was setting it up and finding out about ZFS, ymmv.
No multiusers, so I use a simple vpn to connect to my services from outside.
Apps use NAS ip address:Port and are easily viewed in a browser once installed.
I don’t need much else so I install services as they catch my interest. Tried Tailscale, now looking at NetBird which might be the way forward as they now have a reverse proxy for testing.
Anything else is a bit too complicated for me to maintain.
I needed somewhere to plant files while I reconfigured my ZFS NAS from raidz1 to raidz2 and added an extra drive to compensate for the loss of space. Suprisingly I got away with it!
Mergerfs is quite useful. Now I have a lot of occasional spare storage and somewhere to put snapshots until I can save up for a proper backup drive.
I’ve tried Snapraid but we didn’t get on, I never got the hang of it and lost data as a result.
I think you can use different size disks with ZFS if you use raid10 for the pairs, but the cost would be to high for me. Did I read somewhere that they were working on a way to use different size disks? That would be useful.
Just to add, I’d like BTRFS to be brilliant, so much interesting potential, but I read its deemed safer to use raid10 rather that any variant of raid5. if you’re ever faced with having to rebuild the array, as others have mentioned. Single use is ok as far as I know.
I built a franken-server from some bits awhile ago using old disks of different sizes.
The disks were formatted individually with BTRFS (Mostly any FS would do) and then a mergerfs pool setup across all the drives. I got full use of all my old drives. Sizes varied between 1TB and 6TB, gave me 20Tb of usable space.
Mergerfs has no redundancy and no parity although it is designed to work with snapraid.
If a drive is lost only the data on that drive is lost, you just need to replace that one drive, the data on the other drives remains intact. The loss of a drive in a Raid0 or JBOD array, results in the loss of the whole array and all the data.
Some sort of backup is probarbly appropriate.
https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs/latest/
Might be worth a look.
Thinkpad T420, i5-2520M, 8Gb RAM, 2 x 1TB SATA SSD, 1 x mSATA and a mmc card. Some usb storage plugged in for good measure.
It was bought 2nd hand for children to use, then workshop laptop, eventually retired as occasional NAS space running OMV 8 (Debian Trixie).
I expect it to just work forever.
KDE on Manjaro - The Wayland update caused issues with programs that I used and had depended on for years. I struggled to find suitable replacements or workarounds for the features I was comfortable with on X11.
I experienced random lockups and sound issues, displayport would reset now and again. I worked with these issues until I got fed up and reverted to X11 in the login screen after installing plasma-x11-session and kwin-x11. Everything works as it used to, for now.
This experience made me want to look for alternatives to KDE, I’m not ready for Wayland.
Incidentally, does Wayland have an alternative to X2GO apart from RDP?
🤣 🤣 🤣
Mint is solid, if you use it and it works for you why change? Do you need to bother with windows? What do you use that can’t be done on Linux I wonder? Perhaps work out how to set a VM and try out Debian and even windows in a test sandbox so you’re comfortable with the processes before taking the plunge. Check out KVM, QEMU, and Virt-Manager.
You can run your Pi’s from an sata SSD, I’ve never used SD successfully long term. The lid. Maybe you could tell OS not to shut down when you close the lid and set it never to sleep or turn off? Used that on an old HP laptop (intel 6th gen) with broken screen, KDE, Jellyfin server. Might be worth a look Edit: in power settings…
I use RPi 4 2Gb for Pi-Hole.
Just retired a broken 8th gen intel i3 laptop used for Jellyfin. Its replacement is a GMKTec G3 N100. 4 core 4 thread, single channel SDRAM, but 12th gen Intel which is capable of a wider range of encoding & transcoding. Came with 8Gb ram and 256GB Nvme. Cost Less than £100 on ebay. Jellyfin installed ontop of Debian & very pleased with it.
Currently running Truenas scale with smb shares to service local network.
Additionally VPN on router provides access to home network.
I have a few redundant Rpi’s sitting about now as I’ve consolidated and will be using more NUC/ MiniPC hardware in future. They’re just better value at the moment for me.
Not looked at HA seriously yet, but its part of the plan
I put Antix on a 2Gb 64bit HP Atom. Worked well for notes and browsing. Oddly an SSD seemed to make little difference to performance compared to the previous HDD. Old architecture I guess.
Mate. Stick with Windows or MacOS. I don’t think Linux is for you.
I’ve seen this type of question elsewhere. Why is it an issue?
Standardisation? Corporate Linux? Just like the big boys? Big fish eat little fish.
Careful what you ask for . .
Frugal and recycled. Using a mix of old disks in OMV8 with a mergerfs array, suprisingly they amounted to 20TB, so saved a few bob.
If a disk fails in Mergerfs you loose the data on that disk only and not the array as you would with a pure jbod array.
There is a remove disk utility in the OMV8 mergerfs plugin that allows the data from a failing disk to be copied back to the array, if enough space is available, retaining the data from the failing disk. The disk can then be physically removed. If the array is short on space, add a disk to expand the array before removing the failing disk.
I’ve only ever used it with a failing disk, not a failed disk, I would guess that a backup would be required in that case.
The same applies to mergerfs outside of OMV8, this was easier for me.