beginner home server, low power, low budget

[ErikS]

Hello everyone. I'm kinda new to servers. I have been crazy reading everything I could find, but I find myself running in circles at the moment. I need to make a start somewhere, but get stuck on what hardware to buy; especially motherboard.

I'm just scratching the surface of knowing what's possible, but for know I'd say I'd be using it for storing photo's, automate backups and perhaps some home automation. So I guess it doesn't have to be something really fancy expensive, because that's where the biggest problem arises: Budget. I can only get this done if it doesn't get crazy expensive. Both in buying components as in running the thing, with stupid high prices for electricity. So a good low power idle is kind of important as well.

So I've been looking into second hand. The nice supermicroboards can't be found second hand for a reasonable price at the moment. And as I've come to understand over here, the consumer boards I'd better not use as well. This kinda answers the question already, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. With the very limited budget I can get (both secondhand):

MSI B360M PRO-VDH / Pentium Gold G5600: from my understanding it should be plenty powerful for now. The intention is to play with it some time and upgrade the board to Fujitsu D3643-H or Fujitsu D3644-B and maybe upgrade the pentium to a i3 9100 when avaiable. I know these combinations get quite low in idle power consumption, but it would have me start with a consumer board. A definite no as I've come to understand here, or....?

The other option would be a Fujitsu d3446-s21 gs1 (it comes with an intel i5 6400). Price difference with previous is about 10 euro. Would this be the better choice of the two? This seems the more "professional" board to me, but my knowledge is limited on this part and I can't find that much information on home servers with this board. Would this give me a good base to start on?

I'd love to hear your expert opinion.

 

[Arwen]

There are some Resource pages, (see top of forum for main Resource link). Here are some relevant to you:

Hardware Recommendations Guide

This is the latest edition of the FreeNAS Community hardware recommendations guide. The current major version is R2, dated January 2021, with the last minor update on 2021-01-24. The format has moved away from the forum post form factor, to...

www.truenas.com

I have to waste an entire drive just for booting?

With the advent of TrueNAS Scale, we seem to be getting a large number of people from the Linux community who are not quite grasping what TrueNAS is. TrueNAS is not a "Linux distro" and it is not designed to try to meet your arbitrarily spec'd...

www.truenas.com

Can I please have a small footprint TrueNAS?

The NAS marketplace is filled with small appliance NAS devices, often built on an ARM device platform. These small devices, such as 2009's iomega StorCenter IX2-dl (2x 3.5" HDD) and 2019's Synology DS419slim (4x 2.5" HDD) are handfuls of modest...

www.truenas.com

Please note that in general, TrueNAS Core or SCALE are not designed to be low power, low budget NASes. Plus, ZFS adds a learning curve to the mix:

Introduction to ZFS

This is a short introduction to ZFS. It is really only intended to convey the bare minimum knowledge needed to start diving into ZFS and is in no way meant to cut Michael W. Lucas' and Allan Jude's book income. It is a bit of a spiritual...

www.truenas.com

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer

We realize that new users have a lot to learn when they come to FreeNAS. There's a certain amount of confusion added to discussions when users pick random/approximate terms to describe things. I've spent a lot of time quietly trying to...

www.truenas.com

Other than suggesting those resources for reading, I don't have any suggestions. Perhaps someone else will.

 

[ChrisRJ]

What is the budget?

 

[ErikS]

Thanks for the reading material. Seen some of it but will be reading the rest.

Regarding budget. My initial (possibly naive) thought was getting a decent 2nd hand motherboard and processor for say 200 euro, using the Crucial CT4K4G4DFS8213 (16 GB DDR4 non ECC, yes, not ideal) and cooler I've still got. Then I think I'd need about 200-300 euro for storage (for now about 3TB of actual storage is needed with some room to grow). I'd love to do it proper in one go and that's a challenge with a budget this small, but this is what I've got to work with.

 

[ErikS]

As an addition: I also found available several Asus P10S WS motherboard (either with a Xeon E3-1230 v6, i3-7100T, i7 6700. Varying from 175 to 255 euro). Around budget, but way more expensive than the Fujitsu d3446-s21 gs1 (90 euro) mentioned earlier and not much more functionality I think, apart from the M2 perhaps. All come with ram, but again, no ECC (as far as I can see).

 

[HoneyBadger]

@ErikS how about something like a Dell T110-ii? While your country isn't listed, you're speaking in Euros - I've found one on ebay.co.uk for £65 with "free postage" although I'm not sure how far that extends. It's got 16GB of ECC RAM, and it comes with two 1TB drives (that you'll want to remove in favor of higher density ones to optimize the "storage-per-watt")

They use an older generation (Sandy Bridge) of hardware so it might be slightly more power consumption than a newer device, but I've been quite happy with them from a noise and stability standpoint - I can throw a power meter on one that I have around if you'd like, and see what it peaks at.