I want to tinker with some homelab stuff and I am hoping to get some hardware advice. My understanding is that you can pull off a lot with the processors in off the shelf NAS devices nowadays. The end result would hopefully be a setup that, in addition to giving me something to tinker with, can handle the following:

  • being a sync for all my photos from my phone through something like immich (or something else, I’m not fussy)
  • hosting my owned music, and having it available to stream, perhaps from up to 3 devices at once
  • hosting my owned movies/cartoons/etc, and having it available to stream in up to 1080p from up to 3 simultaneous devices (without transcoding? My understanding is that supporting transcoding from higher resolutions would significantly bump the hardware requirements, so I would plan to just host max 1080p resolution copies of my owned media)
  • other arbitrary things like actually being a NAS, so I could access some files from anywhere in the world, or share files with friends, or what have you

Are these reasonable expectations from a NAS device nowadays or would I have to look into something more high tech? What would you suggest? Any advice welcome as I haven’t dipped into this space very much, I just have a lot of media since I unplugged from spotify and streaming services and I want to bring back the convenience I had with those services.

  • xia@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    I started down the NAS road with a used x86 qnap tvs something-or-other off ebay. Theory being, it was “close enough” to a real server to have alternative OSes (aka linux or truenas) if i did not like or trust the qnap os. It was pretty cheap too, since it was missing some drive sleds.

    Eventually, as my use and dependence on it grew, i ran into it’s memory ceiling (one sodimm slot)… which is not the bottleneck i was anticipating when i bought it.

    If I had to do it again, and since you mentioned being open to tinkering, i would start with a jonsbo (or similar) nas case with commodity hardware. It might be a bit more work/choice, but the flexibility will pay off in the end. Less of a “paint yourself into a corner” effect.