I am technologically skilled to some extent, but not nearly enough to justify the financial investment I'm about to make In a home server without checking that I'm not way off the mark. Reddit tech answers are usually useless, all jerking each other off about being the most vague and useless. So I'm here, just humbly asking if my plan will work before I waste a ton of money if it doesn't.
So I want to run immich, jellyfin, vaultwarden, and a couple other small programs (including backup automation) on a home server. The photos and videos are very important and I want off of large corporate cloud services for all the reasons you can imagine. There are about 2TB of important photos and data right now to backup.
So my plan: a mini pc with a low-level i3 or i5 chip but about 256gb SSD and 8gb ram. I will buy a UPS, a hub/NAS for 2 4TB HDDs, and a separate hub for backups elsewhere on another 4TB HDD. I already have a pc with an ok graphics card (only like 8 years old, but it was above average then) and good processor. My plan is to run the server with Linux, docker, and portainer on the mini-pc, and do the most intensive work (things like local Machine Learning on the photo library in immich) on the gaming pc. To save on energy, the mini pc is the only thing on most of the time, and I will turn on the old gaming pc to do the hard tasks.
I am hoping a friend will allow me to (somehow? I don't know how yet) keep a hub+HDD backup at their place which is updated weekly automatically whenever their computer turns on.
Is this all achievable? Am I missing something small or huge? Any tech people here know something that I'll likely miss on my first attempt?
My pc is pretty power hungry, but thats probably something that could be imporved my migrating to ubuntu and getting rid of the old semi-workinf hard drive. It also has a lot of cores of cpu, which are fairly powerful hungry. Is that still cheaper? And i still want to use my machine for gaming sometimes, though mostly with low-requirement games like Celeste and such.
Yes it'll still be cheaper. 99% of the time your PC will be sitting at idle power, barely drawing more than the mini pc would.
Ok I just realized idk how exactly to know for sure how many SATA ports I have... I think 4? Can you look at these pics and tell me I'm not missing something? I see 5 places to mount things, but 1 is currently a disc drive (pretty sure I should replace that with an HDD), but only 4 places on the motherboard. Is that right?
Wait posting pics isnt working
I'll try like this https://imgur.com/a/XMXpYX7
Wait I figured it out, according to the specs I have 3 SATA ports that work and one that is an eSATA. I can't exactly figure out if I have any USB3.0 ports to determine whether I would be better with a eSATA DAS or a USB3.0 DAS for the extra hard drives... the ports are all black. My device manager says its got USB3.0 but I can't figure out which that is lol
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Well I guess I will go check how many SATA ports my tower has. Might be the best option, really... saves me like 300 bucks on a used computer. I guess I would want a separate SSD for the thumbnails (separate from the one for games and general PCing now) and then 2 HDDs for the data in a RAID1 configuration. So in total that's four I need.... or a powered HUB to the side...