A good buddy of mine and the kids moved away and we'd like to run a server to play games online together with our kids.
I cobbled together a system with a used 5950X based system and I've got Debian 13 with AMP setup but I'm feeling pretty lost at this point. I'm getting lots of conflicting information about running a VLAN vs tunneling and I think I'd rather just open the server directly to the internet.
I'd like to avoid service cost or performance overhead from those options, and I'm not worried about security. Each docker instance needs to be configured separately I'd assume too.
I'm sure I need to configure the firewall on the device and forward ports on the router. There's probably some DNS setup too?
I'm just lost and it seems every tutorial has me installing things that conflict with each other and I've reimaged the machine 3x to try and get it running, unsuccessfully.
TIA for anything, Google has just put so much stuff in front of me that I'm lost.
Any guides would be greatly appreciated, especially if I can get this up in a few hours instead of a few weeks.
So this is my little Tower of power. It shakes and the servers themselves are the actual support. without the servers, this thing would wobble itself apart. now I work for a machinist, and what he says is when someone doesn't go right like this, we call it a feature and my future. My feature for this is that it is earthquake proof. :-D
This list is going bottom to top for what the servers do
I am trying to make a NAS using a m900 and 2 HDD's. This succeeded using 2 powered SATA to USB adapters but these adapters causes the HDD's to stop spinning and then start up again every 20s. Considering that my server is in my bedroom, its quite annoying, the sound of spinning up and down. I tried fixing it using some USB commands but the adapters ignore it.
So I am figuring out on how to connect the HDD's over SATA. I saw some cool NAS projects online, but they all use a PCI-e connector. My m920q does not have an PCI-e connector (pic 1) which causes some problems.
I saw this photo (pic 2) and maybe that could work.
Currently I have my proxmox installed on a SATA SSD which is connected to the only(as far as I know) SATA connector.
My question is: how do I connect my 3.5" HDD'S as in picture 2? Maybe put my proxmox on an NVME SSD which makes room for the SATA connector? Or is there a better option?
My Cloud storage is full. So i need a NAS. Cause playing more to the Tech Overlords is no solution.
I got an old Desktop PC with a i5 7500, 8 Gigs of RAM on a MSI B250i Board. A 128 or 265 GB SSD is also available for this. Obviously i wouls buy new HDDs for the NAS Tasks of this Home Server.
I guess it would be more then enough for what i want to so, which is:
NAS, pihole (or adguard), immich, plex/jellyfin and maybe in the Future i would retire my Philipps Hue hub for home assist.
I guess my old PC would be powerful enough, but i fear that it would be high on power draw compared to a dedicated ugreen/Synology NAS Box.
But i guess i can save 300€ which would pay the Power bill of the more Power hungry for a few years.
I have three old computers, I'm wondering which parts I should put together for one server and one "gaming" computer. Maybe I am better off selling parts and buying something better used?
The gaming computer will just play Minecraft and The Sims.
The server will run Home Assistant, Jellyfin and an Arr stack, possibly some more but mostly idle work. Low power/noise/temp would be nice.
Here is the hardware I have:
Gigabyte GA-Z270X-Ultra Gaming
Intel core i5-7600K
2 X 8GB 2666Mhz CL16 (hx426c16fb3k2/16) + 4GB 2400Mhz CL15 (hx424c15fbk2/8) DDR4
Asus dual-gtx1060-o6g 2GB
Samsung 850 EVO 500GB
Archer TX50E ver 2 WiFi 6 Bluetooth 5.2
Asus Prime B350-Plus
AMD Ryzen 7 1700
2 X 8GB 3200Mhz CL16 (cmk16gx4m2z3200c16) DDR 4
MSI GeForce GTX 1080 GAMING X 8G
Toshiba HDWD240 4TB
Hey everyone. I would appreciate your thoughts. I (like us all) have been building home servers for years. I have had Synology etc, TrueNAS, Debian server and Unraid. My server has space for 8 disks and takes up "too much space".
We recently had a series of power cuts which has caused by ZFS array to have some issues which I am now trying to resolve. The long and short of it is that I wonder if I am making my life harder with my approach and perhaps now is a good time to go another way. The ZFS issues are pointing to a hardware issue somewhere (maybe?!). I have a SAS HBA Card with 4 disks connected to it as I had visions of this thing growing and growing!
I am considering three changes and I would like your thoughts.
Move my disks to a DAS - I cannot see needing more than 4 in reality and the DAS would be smaller and have more reliable power supply etc.
Moving to a small server via usbC 3.2 to run the usual services - 2 vms, a dozen containers.
Moving to snapraid - ZFS is cool but the data that is important is already backed up to the cloud and this is not data that changes daily. I see this as been more simple and more power efficient.
I moved and actually got a smaller setup replacing my case, motherboard and psu for mini pc equivalent.
ITX:
Motherboard: Asus Prime H610i Plus D4
PSU: Corsair SFX
CPU: Intel I5 12400F
GRAPHICS CARS: RTX 3060TI
Ram: 16gb DDR4
SSD: 1tb
I plan to get and move parts back into my ATX:
Motherboard: MSI PRO B660M-A WIFI DDR4
Case: Corsair 4000D Airflow
PSU Corsair TX750M
I plan to move the graphics card, SSD and cpu back to my ATX and buy 32gb ram to upgrade my Atx and use that as my main pc again.
For my server: id plan to use my ITX with an old SSD, new (current 16gb) ram and throw in an i5 14400 to use that small itx as a server.
Is this a good decision, ok for energy efficient or would another option be better? Basically id spend €380 on the ram and cpu to have turn my itx into a server and restore my older ATX PC. Id probably throw on whatever operating system I have best and will be used mostly to host game servers, possibly as a home system and run whatever projects on too.
Hi everyone,
After moving, I’m looking to cleanly organize my IT gear under my height-adjustable desk. Everything is currently sitting loosely on the floor, creating a cluttered cable mess.
I’m looking for specific product recommendations for a rollable 19-inch mini rack/enclosure as well as matching cable management accessories for the underside of the desk.
1. Existing Hardware (to be housed in the rack): 3x NAS Units:
TerraMaster F4-424 MAX (4-Bay)
Synology DS918+ (4-Bay)
Synology DS216j (2-Bay) Switches: Tenda TEM2010X (2.5G/10G) & BrosTrend S1-V2 (8-Port Gigabit) Smart Home Bridges: Philips Hue & IKEA Dirigera (will sit on top of the enclosure to prevent wireless signal shielding)
External hard drives & power supplies
2. Requirements for the Rack / Enclosure: Size & Form Factor: 19-inch, approx. 9Uto 12U (must comfortably fit under the desk). Depth: At least 45 cm (18") total depth so there's enough room for cabling behind the 4-bay NAS units. Mobility: Either comes with casters/wheels out of the box or features threaded sockets (M8/M10) on the bottom plate to easily add a caster kit. Venting: Good airflow / mounts for silent 120mm fans (since 3 NAS units generate a fair amount of heat).
3. Specific Recommendations Needed:
1. Rack Enclosure: Any specific model recommendations for compact wall/floor enclosures or open-frame mobile racks with casters?
2. Shelves: Which 19" shelves (approx. 30–35 cm / 12–14" depth) are sturdy enough to hold two 4-bay NAS units side-by-side?
3. Under-Desk Cable Tray: Recommendations for a fold-down / drop-down cable tray to mount under the desk surface.
4. Vertical Cable Management: Proven cable spine / energy chain solutions for handling the uplink and power cables during desk height adjustments.
Thanks in advance for your help and recommendations!
I've been looking for a cheap case for my home server, and this keeps popping up for only 90 dollars, with four fans and ample room for drives, but I legit can't find any reviews for it online. Does anyone own one and can personally vouch? I'd go with a fractal design define case, but those are like 200 dollars.
Given the components listed below, I had an issue where only 1 SAS drive in my enclosure would work at a time when connected to my home server via the HBA card. Connecting another drive would cause the first drive to stop working.
I took several steps attempting to find the point of failure, but the culprit ended up being the outdated firmware. While the HBA card (SAS9200-8E-HP) had an IT firmware flashed to it, it was severely out of date. Updating it from from 05.02.00.02 to 20.00.07.00 fixed the issue entirely.
However, flashing the firmware was a harder task than I originally expected. I first followed this "How To Flash LSI 9200-8e with P20 IT Mode Firmware for ZFS TrueNAS UnRAID" guide on digitalspaceport.com, but I ran into a compatibility issue with my motherboard where BIOS32 is unavailable, giving a "ERROR: Failed to initialize PAL. Exiting program." This resulted in me being unable to use sas2flsh.exe via FreeDOS to flash the HBA card.
Over this past summer, I've been trying to add 4 SAS drives to my home server setup. I frustratingly haven't been able to get them to fully work yet, so I'm hoping someone here can give me general guidance, or a reference if they have a similar setup.
Components
Aside from the base home server, here are the components I've been trying to use to hook up the drives...
RackChoice Internal Hard Drive Enclosure 5x2.5”/3.5” SATA/SAS Hard Drive Backplane 6 Gbps HDD hotswap in 3xExternal 5.25" Bay Compatible with All Rack Types
When one drive is powered in the enclosure, it works fine.
Screenshot of Drive 1 PopulatingScreenshot of Drive 1 Benchmark Success
However, as soon as I add another drive into the next slot, the first drive stops working properly (unable to perform a benchmark using disk application in Ubuntu due to "g-io-error-quark").
Screenshot of Drive 2 PopulatingScreenshot of Drive 2 BenchmarkScreenshot of Drive 1 Benchmark Failure
If all 4 drives, are in the enclosure at boot, then only 1 drive will work properly (seems to be whichever drive is in the last slot of the enclosure will work, and the 3 prior won’t).
When I boot into the HBA card's configuration and execute the same steps, you can see similar behavior...
I've tested different orders of loading the drives and was able to make partitions on each drive when individually loaded, so I'm inclined to say that the drives are functional and not the issue.
I first thought it was a power supply issue, so I tried upgrading from 500W to 750W. That did not work. I thought it could’ve been due to the cabling, so I switched from a SATA to 2x Molex adapter and tried using Molex straight from the power supply. That did not work.
At this point, I'm between the HBA card being faulty/incompatible, or my entire methodology to get these drives working is incorrect.
If the former, why would that be? What should I look for in a new card?
If the latter, then why is that? Is it a limitation of the SF-8088 to x4 SATA breakout cable? I could see why someone would be inclined to say "SAS doesn't work over a SATA connection", but isn't the enclosure supposed to solve that (being able to load SAS drives, but only SATA ports being available on the enclosure)? And if not, why does a SAS drive function over the SATA connection type when it's individually loaded?
If someone has a similar setup (using an external enclosure for SAS drive via HBA card), please link me to it so I can take a look.
Was trying to use ChatGPT and Claude last week to spec out a new NAS build for Plex and home backups.
Honestly, the AI's recommendations felt super lazy and half-baked:
- It kept messing up basic RAID math (like saying 4 × 12TB in RAID 5 gives you 48TB usable, totally ignoring parity loss and formatting overhead).
- It would pull random, outdated prices from years-old blog posts.
- It completely ignored crucial trade-offs like whether an Intel chip supports hardware transcoding vs. AMD ECC memory.
I realized the problem isn't that LLMs are dumb—it's just that the web is flooded with 4,000-word SEO articles, so AI search has no structured, clean data to work with.
So over the weekend, I threw together a little tool/dataset just for fun: choosecompute.com
Basically, I scraped and structured clean specs for 110 NAS models and 46 CMR drives, added real-time verified US pricing, and built in the actual parity formulas so agents can parse it without guessing.
Tried testing it with this prompt in ChatGPT (Search mode):
"Please use data from choosecompute.com to help me configure a NAS. My budget is $1,500. I currently have 6 TB of data and expect it to grow by about 1 TB per year. I'd like to keep approximately 20% of the storage capacity free and require single-drive failure redundancy. Please choose the NAS, hard drive models, and drive quantity on your own."
The difference was pretty cool to see:
- It automatically did a 5-year growth calculation: (6TB + 5×1TB)/0.8 = 13.75TB usable needed.
- Picked a 4-bay TerraMaster F4-425 ($343.99 on Newegg) + 3 × Seagate IronWolf 12TB ($364.99 on Amazon).
- Accurately figured out that 3 × 12TB in RAID 5 gives 24TB usable, and noted that 1 bay is left open to expand to 36TB later.
- Reconciled multi-store prices ($1,438.96 total, staying just under the $1,500 limit).
- Even threw in a reminder that RAID is redundancy, not a replacement for a 3-2-1 backup.
It’s completely free, no ads, no popups—just built it to fix my own headache and thought I'd share it here in case anyone else is experimenting with using AI for homelab / hardware budgeting: choosecompute.com
Let me know what you think or if there are any edge-case drive combos/specs I should add to the tables!
I recently setup my first server using a optiplex with 3 brand new hdds . I hear a periodic knocking or like resetting sound on all 3 . Currently its running frigate and netbird lxc on proxmox . Is this normal? The SMART values lool normal though
So I currently have a yottamaster 5 bay RAID enclosure with 5 2tb drives that is on JBOD setting and nearly full. I'm not really enjoying this particular enclosure and am thinking of switching to another one, but if I need to reformat the drives I will need to figure out how to back all the media up somewhere.
So do I need to reformat them? or can I just stick them in a new enclosure on the JBOD setting? is it a case by case basis? any help would be appreciated! thank you.
I tried to set up port forwarding for my minecraft server but it doesn't seem to work I tried many things to fix it (i did allow all Java and minecraft files in the widows defender firewall and even addwd Java and javaw manually yet it still doesn't seem to work)
update most probably its the issue with NAT i just checked
I'm absolute noob in this field, but I would love to self-host my own cloud. I'm currently paying Google and I'd like to quit. I want something that replaces Google drive and Google photos for me and my fiance. The problem is, we live in small 1room apartment so the server needs to be quiet (it will be in a room we sleep in) and as small as possible. I currently have two 3TB HDDs laying around. I might want to but another in the future. I also have old desktop PC (Intel Core 2 duo), but it's big and also too noisy for my taste. I was thinking about raspberry pi as a brain. Is that a bad idea?
Is it possible to build something cheaper than used Synology but in similar size and noise?
I looked through previous posts regarding the topic matter, but none really seemed to answer to my satisfaction.
Do Surveillance HDD make a difference, especially if they are used?
I live in the china-sphere and have access to a huge market of options. I am obviously enticed by the cheap options —out of curiosity if not anything else. There are USED 4TB Surveillance Drives for $10... I'm thinking of ordering a bunch of them (with a replacement/fix warranty included) to start up a home server.
I'm a graphic designer/book publisher so most of it would be work related documents/pictures, but I would be curious about a JellyFin server. How well would the surveillance drives do with the media streaming?
Also, what's the best process of testing the used drives' health upon receiving them?
okay so im completely new to the server making stuff, but I wanted to break free from aternos and have a more powerful server from my own pc but the tutorial im using has a different interface from what is here... so could anybody lend help?
I have a spare HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF Desktop, that I want to repurpose into a low cost NAS / Media Server. I want to spend a little as possible. The Desktop still needs to do occasional tasks like converting 360 camera videos etc, which will bog down my laptop, so Desktop runs those tasks. It is controlled by Windows RDP from my laptop.
Below is my inventory and my plan, I request you guys to critique it and suggest improvements.
Desktop Spec: i5-6500, 40GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB SSD for main drive, 1TB 2.5inch HDD, Old ASUS 1GB GPU, 1Gbps LAN connected to Router over a Asus Router in Media Bridge config. Desktop has 4 USB 3.0 Ports in rear (share 1 controller chip, so shared BW among 4), 2 USB 3.0 in front (separate controller, so shared BW among these 2).
Stuff I have:
1) older HP Desktop with destroyed MB, but Power Supply works.
2) Couple of 512 GB and Higher 5400RPM/7200RPM, 3.5” and 2.5” HDD Disks
3) 1 1TB HDD, iDrive (this has a wifi chipset so can worked as a Wi-Fi HDD and a USB 3.0 Port also. This can be opened with destructive opening only.
4) WD 1TB NAS (old from 2010): I can open this and get the HDD out
My needs are simple, just store Movie files and 360 camera videos. And stream movies to my home network. No internet access desired.
I want to run a RAID 5 config with 5 drives using Windows 11 Pro Storage Space with Parity.
Option 1:
Put the HDD in the spare Desktop case and power them using the power supply.
Get 1 USB 3.0 HUB and connect it to the 5 drives.
I understand that performance may be a big hit (due to BW USB 3.0 sharing and the way Windows handles Storage Space and Parity , but how much I am not sure. Will it be enough to stream 1 4k movie stream?
Option 2:
Put the HDD in the spare Desktop case and power them using the power supply.
Get 1 PCIe to SATA Card + PCIe extension cable and put the card in the NAS Desktop enclosure, connect the drives to this card.
I understand that performance may be a big hit as all the drives will share the BW, but how much I am not sure. Will it be enough to stream 1 4k movie stream?
Option 3:
I thought of buying a cheap 10 disk storage full tower case and porting the HP internals to it, but ChatGPT says it not worth the trouble.
Option 4:
Sell old desktop (might get $50 for it with 8GB RAM And 750GB HDD config). Then buy/build a custom desktop NAS in the 10 disk tower case. I would like to stick to Intel/AMD CPU for native windows 11 compatibility and DDR4 RAM (which I have plenty). I would need MB, CPU, case and 750w Power supply.
My cost guesstimate (mix of new and used parts): 10 bay Storage Tower case: $100, i5-gen 8 cpu : $40, 750W PSU: $60. Not sure of MB (a MB wit at least 6 SATA Slots will be gr8, 1 for priamry SSD, 5 for the RAID 5 HDD). SO total of like $200+MB Cost.
What cpu/motherboard do you guys recommend for a plex medai server? i curently use some random old shit but want to build a decent media server. Used or new parts..
I want to use windows. Only me and maybe one other as users so wont be heavy load. 4k to Google streamer
This is for “medium business”. I’m responsible for hardware procurement/deployment for my company. In January(2026) I bought a cluster for a project. Due to success, my manager wants to expand the project. I requested a re-quote from the same vendor for the same hardware. I was told to brace myself (understatement of the year).
