I’ve been interested in self hosting a small variety of services yet I’m so confused on where to start. What would you guys recommend for a server machine?
My main uses (and some of the services I think are appropriate for the use case) are:
- 1tb photo, video storage, push/pull (immich)
- 512gb total shared between downloaded music storage (navidrome) and pdf/ebook storage (calibre)—all pull only
- 1tb movies/tv storage on a media server (jellyfin)
- 512gb storage for random junk or whatever, plus a file transfer push/pull (syncthing…? or nextcloud?)
- potential basic bio website hosting (near future)
- potential email hosting (distant future)
anyways with that all said i have a few questions:
- what server should i buy if i want to expand storage in the future? should i just build a pc with like 3x1tb storage, or 6x1tb storage w/ redundancy? totally confused about the concept of redundancy lol
- any thoughts on the services im suggesting? especially for file transfer
You’re going to want a NAS. Most consumer systems can only wire up four ssds/nvme ssds. If you want 6 TB of capacity and you want redundancy. That means that minimum raid one and 12 TB of capacity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
3 x 3TB drives in RAID 5 will get you (almost) 6TB with only 9 TB total capacity, and its more fault tolerant than RAID 1. Also, its cheaper to replace a single 3TB drive than a single 6TB drive, so it’ll spread your costs out more.
I have 4 x 3TB drives on RAID 5, and I got three of them used for cheap at a local computer place. They’ll have lower life expectancy, but unless more than one dies at a time, it’ll be cheaper to replace them as they do. I got 1 drive new, and plan to replace 1 drive every year or two with new.
Unless you need speed, definitely consider HDDs, especially NAS grade. They’re slower read/write, but your use case shouldn’t need a lot of have read/write. HDDs–even the premium ones–are way cheaper than SSDs right now with the shortage, and have great longevity.
3 x 3tb in raid5 can lose one disk of three. That is less redundancy than raid 1 on 2 disks, plus a write penalty.