Seeking hardware advice
from apotheotic@beehaw.org to homelab@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 2026 22:34
https://beehaw.org/post/25877360
from apotheotic@beehaw.org to homelab@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 2026 22:34
https://beehaw.org/post/25877360
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.
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Yeah as far as backing up data I’m already sorted. This isn’t intended to serve as a backup, rather just a media server/tinkering platform
Interesting okay. So you wouldn’t recommend using off the shelf NAS products? I’d found the UGREEN NASync DXP2800 which seems to be using an intel N100 chip, which as far as I could find would even enable some transcoding streams? Would you advise against something like that?
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Many thanks for the advice :)
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.
That’s valuable advice, thank you!