homelab upgrade recommendations
Hello I've been playing around with an old laptop as my home server for 1 year and I think that now it's a good time to upgrade to something better since it feels a bit too slow.
I was thinking to buy a synology but I would prefer something custom because I hate that sometimes the manufacturers decide to abandon support or change all their terms of service.
My budget is about 1000$ USD, I'm looking for it to have at least 20TB and the option to later add a graphics card would be nice.
What do you recommend to buy? Also what software do you recomend? Also could it work with an n100 mini PC?
I've been using Ubuntu server, with docker containers for several services, but I mainly use it for Nextcloud
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Unfortunately, no - not specifically. I want to get a kilawatt monitor at one point. The best I can do is share my UPS's reported power output - currently at around 202-216W, but that includes both my DS1618 and the DS415+ along with my Ubiquiti NVR and two of my Lenovo M920Qs.
I should probably look at what adding the 5 bay external expansion would take power wise and maybe decommission the very aged 415
Edit: this is also my annual reminder to finally hook up the USB port on my UPSs to... something. I really wanted to get some smart - "Oh shit there's a power outage and we're running low on reserves, intelligently and gracefully shut things off in this order", but I never got around to it.
If you're running home assistant, you can put some inline power monitoring plugs in. I like the thirdreality ones, cause you can set them to "default on" or "default off" after power failure and run it as a zigbee local network without requiring internet access.
Oof, that's a lot of juice.
I'm running a UPS, Syno720+, old gaming laptop as a portainer host, my wifi, router, cable modem, and switches, and that's only using about 50w for everything. Pretty sure the Synology is using the bulk of that power, but I don't have data to back that up.
I'd like to upgrade a few things, but I'm really trying to keep it below 75w. Ideally below 50w if I can. I think my old laptop is good for now, just want more flexibility in my NAS if I can do it without bumping up the power budget.
To be fair - both synologies are running big spinny NAS drives - I could reduce my capacity and my power usage by going with SSDs, but shockingly, I can't seem to figure out what to cull in the 35TB combined storage.
I am debating moving my Vault cluster from a Clusterhat to pods on my fresh kubes deployment - and if I virtualize Pihole, that would also reduce some power consumption. Admittedly, I'm going overboard on my "homelab" - it's more of a full blown SMB at this point with Palo firewall and brocade 48p switch. I do infosec for a living though, and there's reason to most of my madness.