Hello!

I’ve decided to build my own small server for the house and would really appreciate some advice. I’m plannin on using it for storage, video sharing(was gonna do Plex but I jus heard about the price change and something about jellyfin?), Minecraft, and Valheim. Nothin too serious. I have a pair of 12tb HDDs (a Seagate iron wolf and a WD Red), a Lenovo m710q to use as the base, and HexOS to run it . As I’ve opened it up I realized is not gonna be as simple as I thought, like the sata cable not having room for more, or if they can be powered by the board itself. I was already thinking of getting a smallish SSD to run the OS off of and upgrading the ram kit already, but with the HDDs I’m not as sure. Should I look into a sata splitter and get creative with adding the HDDs, should I look into getting a pair of external HDD cages, or should I drop back and punt with my old i5-4590 tower I was using until I upgraded my old rig? I figured the m710q would run it better, but yeah.

Thanks for any help!

  • minoche@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    I would set up a media server in the old case that fits your drives but set up the game servers on the lenovo.

    Plex is fine for people that already have it set up but since you’re starting from scratch why not start with the free one?

    Have you already bought a HexOS license? You can do more with Proxmox or TrueNAS for free.

    • lidstahAEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      I was about to suggest the same: Proxmox VE on the m710q, and something like TrueNAS, or good ol’ Debian (using NFS so the m710q VMs can mount remote folders) and podman/docker/whatever on the i5-4590 to run stuff like Jellyfin.

      Another possibility: Proxmox on both, clustered (not that really hard to achieve), with a “NAS” VM on the i5-4590 node and another transcoding/media-player VM with Jellyfin (you can relatively easily expose PCIe stuff to a VM with Proxmox nowadays, including a gfx card).

      If OP prefers runing LXC containers, Incus can also be an interesting choice.

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    drop back and punt with my old i5-4590 tower

    This one. It’s old, but with RAM and a GPU you’ll be able to handle streaming/transcoding.

    The problem with Dell/HP/Lenovo etc. PCs, especially smaller form factors, is that they’re non-standard, as you found. And not just the motherboard mounts, but also the power supply connectors, and often other stuff too. And any feature found on a typical board, but not used in that particular model, will be missing, like multiple SATA ports, again as you found.

    You could probably get a newer desktop for not much money, too.

    • Clearwater@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      To add on this, my server is running a 4790k, and that’s plenty for all common tasks. While faster is always nicer, the threshold for good enough is very low for server tasks.