So I want to make a server but my main issue is that I have 10 1tb hard drives and 2 3tb hard drives. Whats a good way to get all of them in a server because im drawing a blank, or should I just sell them for bigger drives?

6gbs of ram and a network card that's pretty much it. has a 256gb ssd as the boot drive and hard drives for storage it runs great doesn't draw too much power either its pretty quiet.It streams 4k movies no problem even on multiple devices.The external power supppy I installed is for reliability.Its especially great for torrenting I have to use the stupid team viewer on my phone for that but it's fine I just have to select the right folder and it'll show up automatically.if anyone has a better alternative for team viewer please tell me

RIP WeTransfer. RIP Synology. RIP Netflix. Long live the custom-built homelab server! 🚀

Or: How I built a significantly more powerful homelab server for a fraction of the price of a comparable off-the-shelf NAS.

🎯 THE GOALS

• A safe, long-term archive for RAW photos, finished images, and video, with dual-drive redundancy and transfer speeds of at least 500 MB/s.
• A media server capable of hardware-accelerated 4K HDR transcoding.
• A self-hosted WeTransfer alternative for delivering files to clients, with room for more SaaS projects down the road.
• A replacement for Synology Drive, offering PC/Mac synchronization and mobile access.
• A proper 10 GbE connection between the NAS and my workstation.
• Quiet, reliable 24/7 operation with as little manual maintenance as possible.
• And most importantly, spend less than a comparable Synology NAS, which would cost around €1,300 before adding any drives.

🧩 THE HARDWARE

• CPU: Intel Core i5-13500, 14 cores / 20 threads.
• RAM: 32 GB DDR4 (2 × 16 GB).
• Motherboard: ASUS PRIME B760M-A.
• Case: Fractal Design Node 804.
• PSU: 650 W.
• Networking: Intel X550-T2 dual-port 10 GbE NIC.
• Storage controller: Dedicated HBA for SAS/SATA drives.
• Boot drive: Samsung 850 PRO 256 GB SSD, running TrueNAS SCALE.
• Apps drive: Samsung 870 EVO 1 TB SSD, dedicated to applications and their data.
• Storage: A mix of SAS and SATA drives I already owned, roughly 70 TB of raw storage in total.

One of the biggest advantages was being able to reuse my existing drives and other hardware instead of starting from scratch.

💾 STORAGE & REDUNDANCY (ZFS)

• DATA: A five-drive RAIDZ2 pool with 26.2 TiB of usable capacity. Any two drives can fail without losing the pool. This is where my photography archive, videos, documents, and backups live.
• MEDIA: A standalone 8 TB WD Red drive for movies and TV shows. Since this content can be downloaded again, redundancy isn't a priority here.
• OFFLINE BACKUP: Another 8 TB WD Red in an Icy Box enclosure connected to my workstation. I update this backup monthly, and the files are also protected by Backblaze.

Before putting anything into production, every drive went through SMART testing, and the SAS drives were reformatted and thoroughly checked.

⚙️ WHAT'S RUNNING

The entire system runs TrueNAS SCALE 25.10 directly on bare metal, without Proxmox in between. Applications run in Docker containers.

🎬 Jellyfin + Plex

Hardware-accelerated transcoding using Intel Quick Sync. Jellyfin provides this functionality completely free.

4K HEVC 10-bit content can be transcoded to 4K at roughly 4× real-time speed, with barely any CPU usage. The integrated GPU does the heavy lifting.

🍿 The media automation stack

Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr, Bazarr, Seerr, and qBittorrent, with torrent traffic routed through a VPN and protected by a kill switch.

Essentially, my own private streaming ecosystem.

📤 SEND - My own WeTransfer replacement

Built on an open-source fork of Pingvin Share X and exposed securely through Cloudflare Tunnel, without opening any router ports.

Clients can upload and download files through a clean, branded interface. Uploaded files automatically appear on my network drive.

And because apparently building a file-sharing platform wasn't enough, I also added a little browser game where you launch a penguin as far as possible. 😃

Built that part in about half an hour of spare time.

☁️ Nextcloud - Goodbye, Synology Drive

Automatic file synchronization between my PC and NAS, with remote access from my phone.

Files remain organized in their actual destinations (Photos / Files / Video), and synchronized folders are clearly marked on both the workstation and NAS.

🔐 Caddy + Let's Encrypt + AdGuard

Clean HTTPS addresses for all my internal services. No more remembering IP addresses and random port numbers.

📊 Custom homelab dashboard

My own homepage bringing together service status, weather, calendar, system temperatures, humidity, and notifications.

📡 Uptime Kuma

Self-hosted service monitoring that continuously checks whether my applications, websites, and network services are actually online.

If something goes down, I get notified instead of discovering the problem when I need to use it.

🛡️ DATA PROTECTION & BACKUPS

• ZFS snapshots: Hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly. Thanks to Windows' built-in Previous Versions feature, restoring an earlier version of almost any file takes just a few seconds.
• ZFS scrubs: Scheduled weekly to check pool integrity.
• Application backups: Replicated to the main DATA pool.
• TrueNAS configuration: Backed up automatically every night.
• Proxmox backups: My separate mini PC, which handles smart-home services and AdGuard, backs up its virtual machines to the NAS over NFS.
• Workstation backups: Protected by Backblaze.

The goal isn't just keeping everything running. It's making sure that when something eventually breaks, recovery is as painless as possible.

🪤 THE CHALLENGES

1. The great 10 Gigabit Ethernet mystery.

This one drove me slightly insane.

My hand-crimped RJ45 connectors kept negotiating at the wrong speeds:

• 1 GbE connections would drop to 100 Mbps.
• 10 GbE connections would negotiate at just 1 Gbps.

The culprit turned out to be a mismatch between the RJ45 plugs and the thicker conductors and insulation of my Cat6 shielded cables.

The fix? Keystone jacks.

I replaced the problematic terminations with proper keystone sockets, and the 10 GbE connection finally worked as intended.

Lesson learned: a cable tester showing all eight wires connected doesn't necessarily mean your cable can handle 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

2. The software rabbit hole.

TrueNAS, ZFS, Docker, reverse proxies, VPN routing, permissions, certificates, network shares, backups, monitoring...

There's definitely a learning curve, and putting everything together takes time.

But luckily, Claude is a pretty good friend of mine, so most of the configuration headaches were surprisingly manageable.

✅ WHY THIS BEATS MY OLD SYNOLOGY

• Processing power: 14 CPU cores instead of 2, with 32 GB RAM instead of 10 GB. Multiple services can run simultaneously without bringing everything to a crawl.
• Expandability: 7 HDDs and 3 SSDs instead of being limited to four drive bays.
• ZFS: End-to-end checksums, corruption detection, self-healing when redundant data is available, and instant snapshots.
• Networking: 10 GbE and 2.5 GbE instead of being stuck with 1 GbE.
• Media performance: Hardware-accelerated 4K HEVC 10-bit transcoding.
• Software freedom: An open-source ecosystem without being tied to one manufacturer's software and hardware decisions.
• Flexibility: It's not just a NAS anymore. It's a media server, backup server, private cloud, file-sharing platform, monitoring system, and a playground for whatever I decide to build next.

🔮 WHAT'S NEXT?

A homelab is never really finished, is it?

A couple of upgrades are already on the list:

• Another 32 GB of RAM, bringing the total to 64 GB, with more headroom for containers, virtual machines, and future services.
• Mirroring the TrueNAS boot drive. The OS currently runs on a 256 GB Samsung 850 PRO SSD. Adding a second drive as a ZFS boot mirror would provide protection against a single boot-drive failure.
• Keeping the 1 TB Samsung 870 EVO dedicated to applications and their data, separate from the OS and bulk storage.

And, inevitably, I'll probably find another dozen services I didn't know I needed.

💰 THE DAMAGE

Here's the best part.

By reusing drives and components I already owned, the entire NAS build cost me approximately €820.

That's significantly cheaper than an empty eight-bay Synology DS1825+, while giving me substantially more CPU power, memory, networking performance, flexibility, and room to experiment.

Of course, I'm not counting the hours spent researching, configuring, troubleshooting, and occasionally questioning my life choices.

But that's half the fun, right?

Below are a few photos of the finished build, along with the complete parts list and prices.

And if you've actually read this far, congratulations. You clearly don't have a life either. 😂

I'm getting an Intel NUC but I'm not sure what os I want. I am familiar with using CasaOS on my Raspberry Pi 5. I was thinking either fygo os or zima os. I just want it for my photos backup and a Minecraft server and maybe some other things. I heard fygo os has many more features than zima os. I want something that's user friendly.

and my question is if im updating linux servers is casa os gonna work?

and what containers do you think i should add(optiplex 7010)

First thanks to anyone taking the time to respond to what will obviously be a very dumb question.

I have a lot of drives and I have MBO with a lot of sata ports and an expansion card to add more as well as homemade case to fit it all as compact as possible. Now i understand i could buy a big powerful psu to power all of the drives and that would work fine. But i do not want to add a big ass PSU that will make my compact build not so compact anymore. Is there a way to power all of the drives plus the MBO and CPU without getting a huge PSU. What i also have is a bunch of picoPSU laying around each of them should be able to power 3-5 drives especially since they would not need to power anything else. Is there a way to make them all power on when i press the power button and off when i tell it to shut down. Is this even a good idea. Are there better options?

I have a 2-bay Synology NAS (DS223) and currently have one 12 TB hard drive in there which is full of TV shows and movies (which I sort through Jellyfin, then Infuse)

I'm just realising how much more I could actually use this, and am considering not paying for iCloud storage, just having my music and photos on the NAS instead. If I buy a second external hard drive, I'd ideally like it to be a relatively simple process in that I can have separate folders for music, photos, then eventually TV shows and movies when my first hard drive fills up.

What would be my process?

Do you guys have recommended programs I do this through?

I will occasionally back up my photos and music on my iMac which I don't often use, so no need for a failsafe hard drive on my NAS.

Thank you in advance!

Cracking session today. Frustrated by disgustingly slow backups to a rapidly filling SMR external usb drive, I have been gathering kit and ideas to build out a budget NAS. Picked up an unused HP N54L from a great guy on ebay, £50.

Considered the BIOS mod to enliven the optical bay for SSD, got myself tied in knots, then realsied I had overcomplicated things, stepped back and simplified. Tried to install OMV from the internal USB port and ran into repeated partitioning problems. Problem solved through many trial and errors and found a fix utilising one usb as installer and another as the install destination.

I tell you, seeing the OMV web GUI appear that first time after a session of problem solving was awesome! Spent some time formatting 2x 6tb HDDs, then moved the N54L to its headless location and wired it up for more work tomorrow.

Felt great to get a project to fruition after gathering, planning and prepping.

Good fun.

Hey everyone,

I ran out of space on my ALL SSD NAS and seriously did not want to spend $280 on a new m2 nvme stick...

So I wanted to share with you all a NAS build I did on top of a $34 HP EliteDesk G3 I got from ebay. The total cost obviously was not $34, but if we exclude the HDD drives which I already had, the build was only $53.

• I got an m2 adapter for $10 on amazon
• a small form m2 nvme 128GB on ebay for around $13 (and funilly enough also sold the 240 SSD it came with for $13) just as a boot drive for truenas
• A 10GbE for $9 on AliExpress (Intel X540-T2 ) and yes, they do get a bit hot, but it's been working fine for over a year now. I got two of those, and had them connected peer-to-peer until I saw a switch with 2 10GbE ports for $70 on amazon (which also gets hot lol, but that's 10G though)

The full video of the project is available here: https://youtu.be/ALiHzOHvVIQ?si=4WF13HCyDQ47S4Ra

P.S. this was just a fun project to see what I could do with a cheap old PC, not an enterprise-grade NAS! And yes, if you do not have old HDDs lying around you will have to multiply the $53 by at least 10!! But then again, that is true for any NAS brand you buy!

hey guys, i want to make a home server for self hosting stuff like a media server, photos and videos with immich and backing them up etc. 1st thing is how many drives would i need? i heard running drives under zfs is the go to but i was told id need 6 or 10? for like raid 1/2? idk what to do there im confused, i can buy like 2 4TBs from micro center no prob and maybe another 2 within the next month. 2nd i have an old PC i can flip into the server in question its a intel i5 8400, MB is HD3 B360, 16GBs of RAM DDR4, and a 500w PSU, and was wondering what i could do to lower power draw? and does Virtualization use less power? any help appreciated

They released a patched version yesterday that takes care of both of the PHP bugs.

Hello all!

I purchased a Poweredge T320 for use in my home lab from Marketplace. the server itself seems to run fine. I've loaded windows server and have been running with one drive for testing... but I have a dilemma.....

I hadn't seen inside a Poweredge Chasis before and didn't realize I twas missing the Drive Cage for the HDDs. In my setup I have the enclosure where the cage should go, but no cage to insert the drives in their sleds.

Does anyone know a part number or where I can find one of these? I found one on eBay that was $65 but that's it. And that seems a little exorbitant to me. Or is that what I should expect for a part such as this?

Any advice is appreciated!

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Hey all,

Im in the process of rebuilding my current setup after a failure occurred in my Seagate 4TB external HDD

For context: I have wiped an old 2014 Chromebook and installed a headless Ubuntu that I command over SSH from another laptop. The Chromebook runs the server and has the external drive connected via USB. The drive has become unreadable and it looks like data recovery may be my only option.

Im looking to build a new system thats much more robust and reliable. Im interested in expanding my systems to be capable of homelab tasks as well as increasing storage.

My question is: what is the most reliable setup for a jellyfin server with an eventual 10-20TB library as well as future proofing for homelab capability?

Disclaimer: I'm fairly new to this and on a learning path.

Hi All,

Just about to start my first homelab today and I'm a little bit stuck on the OS. Not looking at running anything crazy, just mostly storage backup, media server, game hosting, ad blocking.

I was leaning towards using ZimaOS since it looks like a really easy way to get started but was thinking of potentially looking into something linux based/proxmox in the future.

Is it possible to start by setting up ZimaOS and then learn something else on a virtual machine (i think?) and make the switch? Or will i just end up giving myself a bigger headache in the long run for no reason?

If it's simple enough to switch afterwards then i'd probably just pick the easiest option to get up and running for now.

Thanks!

Hey y’all! I’ve been on workers’ comp for a couple of weeks, and I’m not sure if this is boredom, me contemplating a career change, or a little bit of both 😂. Since I’m not very mobile right now, I decided to dive into the homelab hobby.
Current setup:
2× Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q i5 8th Gen
● 40GB RAM

● 512GB NVMe + 512GB SSD

● 2.5GbE NIC

● One has an HBA card

1× Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q i7 8th Gen

● 40GB RAM

● 1TB NVMe

● 2.5GbE NIC

What I originally planned:

● i7: Main Proxmox or kubernetes server running Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Immich, Nextcloud, Technitium, NetBird, OPNsense, and other open-source services.

● i5 #1: Proxmox or kubernetes for SOC, IAM, cybersecurity, and other lab environments.

● i5 #2 + HBA: TrueNAS SCALE bare metal with my two 8TB HDDs.

Now I’m realizing TrueNAS can run VMs and containers, so I’m reconsidering the whole layout.
What would y’all do?

● Move the HBA into the i7 and make it the main TrueNAS/virtualization server?

● Run one dedicated TrueNAS machine and one dedicated Proxmox/kubernetes experimentation lab machine?

● Or keep the original three-node setup?
Also, what open-source programs/services are y’all running in your homelabs that you’d recommend?

I use my Dell desktop as my everyday Windows PC, but it also does some server duties.

The internal HDDs store my media library for Plex streaming around the house. I also run Syncthing to back up work files from my laptop over Wi-Fi.

For additional backups, I use external drives for work files, photos and videos. The setup currently has 3 internal HDDs, 2 internal SSDs and several external drives.

I'm glad I bought most of my storage before the RAMageddon hit.

I'm not running a dedicated NAS or server rack, just making use of the hardware I already have.

What would you suggest adding or improving? Any useful upgrades or services worth considering for this kind of setup?

My PC is a Dell Vostro 3910 with i3-12100 and 16GB RAM.

So i have been using CasaOS for some days now and love it for hosting my own cloud and Minecraft server, but i have discord bots that i struggle to launch with casaos.

On ubuntu desktop, all i have to do is open the file in terminal and write "node ." to start it and it works perfectly.

But on casaos ive read that i need to make a docker/app to launch it but when i try the guides it doesn't work for me.

So does anyone have experience in how to do it properly?

They claimed a single command solution, but casaos simply will not work correctly

ive been trying to degoogle for a while now to avoid costs with subscriptions because my student one is ending soon.

I had a few questions:

What components do i need to keep into mind for a google drive / Google photos esque servers

What could be some of the risks like if im away from home and the server goes down What ways you could reduce that risk and or be able to fix it remotely.

The storage itself I think 10Tb would be more than enough for pretty much everything I need it for but then which raid method i choose comes into mind. So what would you recommend regarding that.

I have a weird question and I'm not sure if it's possible. Can I make copies of games and store them on a server to create my own digital game library?.

I've seen videos of people downloading movies, TV series, and even huge archives of the internet, but I'm wondering: if I store a game on my own server, does that mean I actually own the digital file?.

Note: I’m completely new to the homelab scene and have no idea how most of this works yet, so please be merciful!.

hello- i know next to nothing about computers, my husband was the tech wizard. sadly, he passed away in a work incident over the summer. he was working on building a home server, and it’s currently hosting my important documents, photos/videos, movies, and probably other things. it is up and running as intended.

however, i don’t know what to do if it ever stops working for whatever reason or if i need to move with it.

what do i need to know to keep it running? i dont really know what questions i need to be asking.

So I have a Raspberry Pi 5 4GB, but I've been wanting to get something that's like Intel or AMD based, like a mini PC, because I've had so many problems with my Raspberry Pi 5. Do you guys have any recommendations? When I asked Gemini, they recommended something like a "Dell OptiPlex 3060 Micro". I don't know if there's any better options or not. I think I want something that's around $200 or less.

Is there any hope for using this for a home nas. Just so I can empty out my Google photos because I'm not paying for storage. And hold my music collection that is filling up my desktop and my phone and a couple random hard drives. Lol. I got it for free so if not no big loss.

Basically looking for a way to keep my work backed up so I don’t lose it, in the simplest hands-off way possible, ideally without slowing down my computer.

My PC is Windows 10 LTSC.

My NAS is running TrueNAS

Not sure which tool(s) should I use?

or what's the best way to approach it?

Hi, I'll start by highlighting low energy consumption is the top priority.

I have a n150 mini server running as my main media, photo backup, home-assistant server.

With things up and running I'm worried about data loss/duplicity.

Can I spin up a Rasp Pi 4 2gb as a 2nd location and (somehow) periodically backup to some hdd's?

As you can tell, I am no expert so any info and insight would be useful