Yeah I figure it’s the sort of thing that requires some firmware support at least.

One thing I’ve always liked about using laptops as servers more than the battery has been the built-in display and keyboard. 😁

Ahh, okay - it is a different chemistry. I wasn’t sure - thanks!

battery of this machine is toast (holds up for half an hour or less)

Fair.

as someone mentioned in another comment: unattended laptops with batteries can be actually bad. Batteries on certain cases can leak and cause fires, so for me, if it can work without it great, otherwise I have to drop the idea

I’m not clear on how a UPS would be different in this regard. They both have high-capacity batteries that need monitoring. Unless the UPS is using a different chemistry?

If the laptop has a way to limit charging to, say, 70% in order to not turn into a spicy pillow, it would be viable.

Firstly - I love the phrase “spicy pillow”.

Secondly - It would probably depend on the laptop and its battery health. But also the OS can limit charging I believe? I haven’t looked too far into how it works but I’ve got my laptop setup to only charge to 90% because I’m nearly always plugged in. I don’t know if that relies on any hardware/firmware options though.

It’s a laptop… One of the benefits is that it already has a battery, no?

I would definitely scale things out slowly. While the NAS will eventually be the cornerstone of your setup it will be an investment. You could also try setting up a cheap server as a stand-alone to get the feel for running applications. Maybe even as cheap as a Raspberry PI or small single-board system. Some of them have pretty decent specs at very affordable costs. Such a system could go on to serve simple services in your final architecture (DHCP, DNS, etc.).

There are sometimes ways to upgrade a RAID later. In one scenario I replaced the drives one at a time with larger drives and created a second RAID on the same disks (in a second partition). Wasn’t a great idea perhaps - but it worked! I just expanded my LVM pool to the new RAID and was off to the races. I’m sure performance was hit with two RAIDs on the same disks - but it did the job and worked well enough for me. 😉

I’m not as familiar with zfs to know what options it has for expansion. With MD these days I think you can just fail and replace each disk one-by-one and expand the raid to the new size once they’re all replaced. MD can be pretty picky about drives having exactly the same number of sectors though so care must be taken to use the same disks or partition a bit smaller than the drive… Waiting for each disk to sync can take ages but it’s possible. There may be other options for ZFS (scaling with more disks maybe?).

Good luck with your project!

Am I overcomplicating this?

I fear that you may be overthinking things a bit. For a home server I wouldn’t worry about things like min/maxing memory to storage sizes. If you’re new to this then sizing can be tricky.

For a point of reference - I’m running a MD RAID5 with 4TiB x 4 disks (12TiB usable) on an old Dell PowerEdge T110 with 8GiB of RAM. It’s a file server (NFS) that does little else (just a bind9 server and dhcpd). I’ve had disks fail in the RAID but I’ve never had a 2 disk failure in 10+ years. I always keep my fileserver separate so that I can keep it simple and stable since everything else depends on it. I also do my backups to and from it so it’s a central place for all storage.

That’s just a file-server. I have 3 proxmox servers of widely variable stats from acquired machines… An old System76 laptop with 64GiB RAM (and NVidia 1070 GTX that is used by Jellyfin), a Lenovo Thinkserver with 16GiB RAM, and an old Dell Z740 with 128GiB RAM (long story).

None of these servers are speed demons by any current standards, but they support a variety of VMs comfortably (home assistant, jellyfin, web sever, DNS, DHCP, a 3 node microk8s cluster running searxng, subsonic, a docker registry etc.)

RAM has always mattered more to me for servers. The laptop is the most recent and has 8 cores, the Lenovo only has 4.

Could things be faster? Sure. Do they perform “well enough for me?” Absolutely. I’m not as worried about low-power as you seem to be but my point is that you can get away with pretty modest hardware for MOST of the types of things you’re looking to do.

The AI one is the thing to worry about - that could be your entire budget. VRAM is king for LLMs and gets pricey quick. My personal laptop’s NVidia 3070 with 8GiB VRAM runs models that fit in that low amount of memory just fine. But I’m restricted to models that fit…