Great news! I started my selfhost journey over a year ago, and I’m finding myself needing better hardware. There’s so many services I want that my NAS can’t handle. And I unfortunately need to add GPU transcoding to my Jellyfin setup.
What’s the best OS for a machine focused on containers and (getting started with) VMs? I’ve heard Proxmox
What CPU specs should I be concerned about?
I’m willing to buy a pre-built as long as its hardware has sufficient longevity.
Depending on how many bays your Synology is, you might be best off getting a nuc or a mini pc for compute and using your synology just for storage.
I did his when I moved from unraid because I wanted better infra as code for my dockers etc. Kept unraid with all my drives and use NFS mounts from another machine with proxmox that runs a VM for my dockers
That’s the route I took too. NAS for storage and simple docker containers, Minipc for compute/GPU.
This is precisely what I do with my nas.
I have 9…ish tiny/mini/micros for compute, two NAS (locally).
Solid approach
9? That’s quite a bit of compute lol.
My journey started with 1 server, then 4, then 5 (one functioning as a NAS), then 1 (just the NAS box), then I moved and decided to slim it down to a proper NAS and 1 mini PC/NUC clone. Now I’m up to two because the first was an Intel N105 which just isn’t up for the challenges lol
3 are for the family, 3 are for work stuff, 3 are for me as toys.
(Plus a Mac mini and a p330 as spare desktops for me, thus the -ish)
It’s 4 bays, and we’re eating that space up quicker than I imagined
I run a 4 bay and a N100 NUC.
The Synology is almost a pure storage machine. Works really well with Proxmox on the side. Not a single file has made it kneel yet, and I’ve thrown some high bitrate badboys on it.
Is not upgrading the drives an alternative?
I feel like you sacrifice a lot of practicality removing the NAS, such as automatic backup from phones and very easy remote access.
Personally I also prefer separating data and software, so I don’t lose it all if a component fails.
Just my .02
That’s my goal: use the NAS as a NAS, use a computer for containers and the like. I’m using Seagate Exos for the NAS exclusively
Cool, well then I can at least share what I went with that has worked really well: GMKtech N100 NUC from Aliexpress with 16 GB of RAM.
It’s hosting Jellyfin with transcoding, PiHole, Home Assistant, Heimdal, a Valheim server and loads of other small LXC’s in Proxmox.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen it break a sweat.
The NAS holds the .arr stack and Qbit, but that’s it.
I cannot speak to the longevity of it, but I repasted the CPU once I got it and it’s chilling below 45 degrees all day long, so I expect it to last for many years. I also enabled C-states to get idle consumption as low as possible, around 7-8W.
Best of luck with whatever setup you end up with mate!
I have a 6 bay, so yeah that might be a little limiting. I have all my personal stuff backed up to an encrypted cloud mount, the bulk of my storage space is pirated media I could download again, and I have the Synology using SHR so I just plug in a bigger drive, expand the array, then plug in another bigger drive and repeat. Because of duplication sectors you might not benefit as much from that method with just 4 bays. Or if you have enough stuff you can’t feasible push to up to the cloud to give piece of mind during rebuilding I guess.
Plus one to this. It’s super nice separating concerns in this way.