For reasons unexplained, you have no homelab hardware, but $1,000 in cash earmarked for the purpose.
What are you buying, what are you installing on it, and how is it different from what you’ve done previously (i.e. lessons learned)?
For reasons unexplained, you have no homelab hardware, but $1,000 in cash earmarked for the purpose.
What are you buying, what are you installing on it, and how is it different from what you’ve done previously (i.e. lessons learned)?
N5105 nas board, 32-64gb of ram, 1x 500gb nvme SSD, some sort of case, and a bunch of HDDs, I like the 8tb ironwolfs, they are cheap enough, but large enough.
Maybe the n6005 if you can find it. But it’s a great server, handles most selfhost stuff. I run Ubuntu server on it, it’s just the cleanest and easiest to use, no GUI needed.
What’s nice is it’s super low power, and cheap. So you can eventually migrate to a more powerful Proxmox server, on minipcs, like NAB6, than just turn the n5105 into a TrueNAS server, and even duplicate it for backups, and triplicate (if you are really feeling it), for redundancy. Getting a 2nd and 3rd Proxmox minipcs enables HA on VMs. So yea. That’s my goal. ATM I gotta migrate to the Proxmox.
I loved migrating to 3 nucs from a 2015 synology, so think you are 100% correct. (It allowed me to use TB networking for a 26Gbe ceph network)