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Use TrueNAS to avoid spending on idle servers
In the last years, I bought several VPS and set up lots of services from awesome offers in LET. However, many of those services are just for fun and to learn some new things. I am thinking about a plan to avoid spending too much money on idle servers. After that, my goal is to only have 1 or 2 VPS for website and database.
Basically, I decide to set up a home lab and don't have to pay recurring payments. For VPS, I can spin up new VPS and delete them instead of idling. For storage, I don't need to buy Storage VPS and just use my own NAS with its own RAID.
My plan is to buy a NAS (Asustor AS5402T) and install TrueNAS on it. I choose this Asustor because it has 2 slots for 3.5 inch HDD and 4 slots for nvme SSD. It is quite small too. If I build a mini ITX PC, I don't think that it can be lower than $500 (excluding hard drive costs) and have that much storage slots.
The reason to use TrueNAS instead of the original OS is that I am afraid that the company will shut down services and the migration will be much harder with many data.
If I need more computation, I think I can buy another mini pc from minisforum or beelink and store data in the NAS.
What do you think? Do you have the same problem? What is your solution?
- What do you prefer?69 votes
- Buy more VPS24.64%
- Rent a dedicated server24.64%
- Build home lab50.72%
Comments
I currently have a few VPS from AlphaVPS, HostHatch, GreenCloudVPS and Racknerd
Well depend @quanhua92 if you like redundancy keep the actual VPS
Yes. I still have a few VPS to serve the blog. For the Jellyfin server, I think it should be fine to run an Nginx proxy on VPS to route traffic to my home lab through tailscale vpn.
spend?
Just a note with these small NAS with NVMe expansion. For example the N5105 only has 8 PCIe lanes, and to connect 4 NVMe slots it would need 16 lanes. They use PCIe switches to connect all the devices, so you won't get full bandwidth to all of them.
For me I went with an ITX motherboard and a small case (Silverstone DS380). They don't sell them anymore, so if you went this route you might be interested in something like a Jonsbo N1/N2.
Don't you want ECC RAM though?
People say they don't need ECC, until their RAM fails and ZFS scrubbing took their data away :-)
I'm half-joking, but I sleep better at night knowing I have ECC. In any case, just as RAID is not a backup, ECC is not a backup :-)
Home hosting is a nice cheap solution for personal use and backups (both storage and replicated services)
But for anything with any expectation of uptime the trade off is poor. All it takes is one hardware failure while you’re on holiday etc
Unless you need unusually high specs (other than bandwidth) VPS or dedi may even be cheaper than electricity costs. Not to mention the annoyance cost of randomly saturating your home upstream
If you want to save money on idle VPS by having systems around to continually wipe and play with, I suggest this: https://www.etsy.com/listing/492913299/c4labs-bramble-4-or-6-stack-cluster-case
Your very own server rack, that takes almost no space.
im pretty sure i already described in detail my setup, but yeah, for storage i'll never use a VPS
home server is nice, but yeah, i want 99.99% and dont want to pay for the electricity
im taking my racknerd VPS to the grave and will try to build a nas in following years.... storage still expensive
Yes. I saw some nas build with Jonsbo N2. That case is great with 5 HDD. I tried to calculate the cost and it should be higher than $500. The hardware parts are not available in my country so the total cost should be much higher. So I am trying to start with these small NAS until I reach their limit.
In the case of 4 nvme, will the speed of each drive be under 1GB/s instead of 3GB/s?
The cost for 4-6 Pi seems to higher than a mini pc or an itx build. But the knowledge gains during the project must be better. I will consider buying a Pi to try
Your recurring homelab payments are:
No matter if homelab or remote, you want the data duplicated and easily accessible. Your moving the problem
The total cost of all VPS I bought during the last two years should be a few hundred dollars. If I spend that money on a mini pc or the Asustor NAS then it is much better financially.
The power usage of modern pc is not high. It is only a few dollars per month. I think the cost of electricity is same as 1 VPS. But the performance and storage are skyrocket. You have dedicated cpu and a few TB of storage
here it's 40ct/kwh
my vps dont cost much, but yeah... im looking to get a NAS/home server for stuff like paperless, home asisstant etc
IMO, the skills gained during the homelab are invaluable. I can exchange the time to learn those skills.
At first, I want to use Proxmox to learn how to manage dedicated servers in future. But the complexity of using TrueNAS and Proxmox in one pc is so high. It is not easy to passthrough the hardware on the small devices. If I have the space for a mid tower case then my next project must be a Proxmox server.
Electricity for a small NAS should be cheaper than a 8GB VPS in my country.
I plan to use rsync to copy data on NAS to another place. If the amount of data is too much then another NAS is required and it is not cheap though
I got a mini PC to replace a handful of my idling VPS. A single 4TB HDD costs ~$60 here, so getting several to set up RAID is cheaper than paying for a storage server in the long run. The only issue I current have is CGNAT. Getting a VPS to do port forwarding is unfortunately impossible (living in China so there’s GFW. Local VPS is extremely expensive). IPv6 partially solves the issue but still quite inconvenient.
If there’s no GFW or local providers are as cheap as their US/EU counterparts, I’ll definitely cancel all of my VPS (or leave one to do port forwarding).
I think some kind of offsite backup/cloud storage is critical for irreplaceable personal data. What happens if your home was burglarized, flooded, caught fire, etc.?
dedicated + proxmox
I think it depends on what switch chip they are using, but if I had to guess yeah if you were to stress all four drives at once you'd be limited to under 1GB/s per drive. But if this use case is infrequent should be fine.
I do recommend on a homelab with your own hardware. Got to try at least, the skillsets learnt are valuable. My belief is that you should own your data and not have a provider handle it. Back ups are important with the 3-2-1 strategy. Be prepared for a lot of time spend on troubleshooting but it will be worth! All the best!
What's the cheapest price you've got for SSD PCIe 4 M.2. of 1TB or more?
I've got a Kingston 1TB for $50, but are there any cheaper ones on local shops?
I recently got a 2TB Samsung 980 Pro on Amazon Prime day for ~$112
You're weird.
I have several Synologies at home...and back them up both locally (mirror them in pairs) and to the cloud.
Power is to expensive, its cheaper to grab a dedi from Kimsufi, the monthly price barely pays for the power alone.
My main server is UnRAID, but was looking for a zfs benefits as a storage backup and S3 server as well as use 10Gbe. Just as I configure S3 natively, they announce removing it on the next update. sigh
Fuck TrueNAS. What a hassle for a basic home setup. Docker keeps breaking (logs, shells, etc) and currently syncthing is fubar. I'm trying to find time to check out openmediavault.
UnRAID is way better for a stable home server.
I've got two Storaxa's with upgrades on order. ETA is like 1-2 months. I think I'll regret that as the m.2 slots are PCIe lane limited. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/storaxa/fully-customizable-home-cloud-storage-with-remote-access-nas
I've been home labing in some way since I've started learning linux back in the 2000s. It is a good way to learn things for sure. My setups have never been elaborate because of electric prices and keeping the noise down. If I had a bunch of 1Us going at home I am sure my wife would kill me.
I've been following this and will be quite surprised if they even ship. The cynic in me thinks they shipped everyone SD cards just to cover up their scam.
I haven't heard about any issues with data integrity related to non-ECC RAM for years actually. I believe it's safe nowadays
New update!
I figured out that Dell Optiplex 7080 has 2x M.2 and 1x 2.5 SSD. I can buy a used barebone i7-10700T for around $300 and new 64GB RAM for around $120.
I think it is better to install Proxmox to SSD and set up 2x M.2 as RAID. It is cheaper than the Asustor NAS setup and the CPU & RAM are way better. The form factor is also smaller. The only downside is smaller storage which is not a big deal atm.