A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
Assume an unlimited budget for now, I just want to know what's out there.
I mean, if you're willing to pay the price of a car per SSD they go up to at least 122TB density per drive... (e.g. Solidigm SBFPF2BV0P12001 D5-P5336 -- $16K~$20K depending on supplier from a quick search)
I don't actually recommend that for personal use, but since you were curious about what's out there, there's some absolutely crazy shit in enterprise server gear if you have deep enough pockets.
For that kind of money, I would expect the SSD drive to be able to provide some other qualities beyond technical things like capacity/bandwidth/latency.
Some very good qualities.
For the price of the car I would expect the SSD drive to grow wheels and be able to actually drive it
For that kind of money, I would expect the SSD drive
For that kind of money, I would expect breakfast and a blowie every morning.
What you get is something with an acceptable warranty and maybe some support.
What you then realize is what you DON'T have on your consumer gear.
Exceptional qualities that usually go for a high price.
Those are awesome lol what would be a good system to run them in?
EDIT: I feel I need to say I'm not actually going to pay for that, 4x4tb is probably plenty but it's still awesome.
It looks like the connector is U.2 so I'd look for motherboards that indicate support for that explicitly. From a quick search, it looks like SuperMicro makes some. This is getting out of my area of expertise though; I just know the crazy drives exist...
Yeah, that's not going to work. You'll have to at least rank your requirements. Is size more important, or is it the number of RAM slots? Also, what is "enough CPU/Ram"?
Also also, "unlimited" will only get you unrealistic things like the 10k+ PCI-E SSDs.
Silence is the only requirement, I just want to know what's out there that other people like. I prefer small. I own SSDs I am interested in the NAS itself.
You're requirements are too vague as "lots of apps/VMs" doesn't describe the expected load. Overall though if you want small just build a mini-ITX system. Then you can put in any x86 chip that fits your needs.
https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-me-mini-n150
I have no experience with this. Just sharing so you have more ideas to think about
@sic_semper_tyrannis @flork I have a similar tiny PC. There's a few manufacturers of similar items, some even have like 4 or 6 m2 slots to make excellent little NAS or similar.
From memory, Geekcom (Sp?). have a look on your favourite AliExpress-type mart. Intel N100 or N150 CPUs seem to the thing, but beware of the RAM limits for those if that's a thing for you. There are some fun AMD ones out there too.
OK now that's cool! Thanks for sharing.
enough, a lot, more demanding.
You need to give some sort of guidance here.
Give me the smallest and fastest that you can come up with as long as it is SILENT
I have an ancient Drobo.
Believe it or not, it's only sound is the fan, which I can't hear even when it's on.
SSD will still generate heat, so will need a fan.
NAS only, or storage and workload?
"Home Server" more than "NAS" so I guess, your typical docker apps, but no LLMs or anything. I would like at least 4 hard drives, preferably m.2 but SATA is fine too.
If you're looking for more compact than powerful asustor has this https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=91 12 nvme sticks with 8tb per stick would give you 96tb of storage in that small form factor. Only problem might be how much power you'd get out of that processor but you can bump the ram up to I think it was 96 gigs
Thank you this looks great
If I/O speed is important the challenge will be getting lots of nvme slots in a small form factor. Many atx motherboards have bifurcated pci-e slots that can be converted to manage 2 nvme drives at once (in addition to on-board nvme slots) but I don’t know if matx boards do that, so if you wanted 3+ drives that would be the first thing to consider. If you just want a bunch of sata ssds there are more options, but all considerably slower.
Silence is the only important aspect, SATA is fine. I see a lot of options out there much smaller than ATX. Here's one example: https://www.lincplustech.com/products/lincstation-n2-network-attached-storage but like I said I am more curious as to what everyone around here is doing.
Ok, so if you want to do a bunch of drives in a box:
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/FhPzK8/gigabyte-mw50-sv0-atx-lga2011-3-motherboard-mw50-sv0
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/yFWJ7P/crucial-bx500-4-tb-25-solid-state-drive-ct4000bx500ssd1
However, that's expensive. I would go with spinning disks.
If you want to bring the cost down more,
You can drive the price down more by buying a used system.
The pile of SSDs will be easiest to stuff into a box.
You will need to get creative with cooling.
Thank you that's probably too big for my tastes but I appreciate the insight.
The last board suggested with 5 ports would handle 4 drives in raidz2.
This is smaller even. https://pcpartpicker.com/product/hRBrxr/asrock-motherboard-970mpro3
I would prefer having the smaller board with the hba and putting 8-10 smaller drives in raidz3. That would give you 6 TB with three drives for failure to prevent loss.
Outside the drives, the cost would be under $200 for the board and the hba.
If you have an old system with two PCI-e 16 ports, then your cost is about $90 before you start buying drives.
I'm doing similar with a DDR3 system and spinning 1 TB disks. It's fast enough to serve video streams.
If the big consideration is really sound, doing whatever is necessary to use larger, but slower (wide, high CFM per dB/RPM) and higher quality (fluid dynamic bearings) fans might serve the purpose regardless of other hardware. Some of them are rated to be <20dB, quieter than a whisper, and fluid bearings are supposed to be mostly impervious to the noise added by aging that hits a lot of fans.