First-time NAS admin, hardware from iXsystems

[marclar]

I'm looking at buying my first NAS but before I pull the trigger, I wanted to get a sanity check.

The machine will be used by 4 family members; we're mainly interested in leaving cloud services and throwing out paper.

Since I'm the only technical person in the family, I want to be confident about redundancy before I ask them to entrust me with their baby photos and tax returns. So first question, is this sufficient in terms of redundancy?:

• TrueNAS with 2 x 14TB drives, mirrored
• Server configuration periodically backed up w/ `tarsnap`
• Full snapshots:
  • stored on a 3rd HD, internal or external to the NAS, and `rsync`ed to a remote external HD (I'll ask a family member to host this)
  • OR
  • stored using Duplicati on B2
  • OR
  • stored using Duplicati on Sia blockchain

I think the Sia backup option is really interesting (and low-cost) but I'd love to hear if anyone has had positive/negative experiences with it.

Second, I'd like to use this server for some Docker applications for my family members. The big ones would be:

• Bitwarden
• Jellyfin
• NextCloud
• Paperless
• PhotoPrism

With only 4 people using this occasionally, I can't imagine I'd need much in the way of RAM or CPU, but I would like the option to use Jellyfin from 3 locations without the server getting bogged down. I don't expect this use case but it could happen. And importing photos to PhotoPrism, while probably not happening frequently, would take some processing.

Given the above, should I be fine with 32GB RAM? And how necessary is an 8-core chip instead of a 4-core?

Thanks!

 

[blanchet]

If you have the budget an iXsystems TrueNAS Mini X is the best possible choice because they are ready-to-use and there is not hardware compatibility issue. Another good choice is HPE Microserver Gen10 plus.

Notes:

• To use docker on TrueNAS you have to create a Linux VM first
• A 4-core and 32 GB of RAM is far enough for your goals.