After some advice on consolidating things

[Jimbeam3678]

I currently have:

Hardware
Rasp Pi
Beelink NUC N150 16 Gb ram & 512GB SSd
2TB external SSD
2TB Mechanical drive in a caddy

Software running
Plex and Arr's on a windows the Nuc
Home assistance running in a VM on the Nuc
Ad guard running on Pi
Experimenting with immesh on a VM on my Mac mini

I'm pondering consolidating all of the applications mentioned above (plus file hosting too replace google drive)running the Nuc.

What is the best option? Proxmox, Unraid, Unbuntu on the Nuc with application running in their own Vm's or something else? Ideally I don't want to spend any further cash on hardware unless I really have to. I don't mind putting in a few hours to get it up and running but I don't want to be a slave to it and be 'fixing things' every weekend. I want to set it up and forget like Ad guard and home assistant etc.

What are my options?

Edit model number of machine.

 

[Avalon]

Normally the generic answer is UnRAID, the ability to mismatch drive sizes and spin down when not in use/only spin up the single drive in use makes it a more efficient solution where raw IOPS aren't the priority, however not ideally with a NUC, or at least not without caveats.

Obviously a NUC has seriously limited expansion options, that either means adding multiple external drives (which is a horrible plan), or going down the external multi-drive caddies. USB and external are terms not best suited to storage, and especially not at scale. Can you? Yes. 4 bay USB 3 enclosures start around £100, 8 bays are at least twice that new. It's sub optimal, has multiple additional points of failure and introduces another layer of complexity, but it could work for you.

Your other options are to move to a split compute and storage set-up or a combined set-up that scales better with internal drives. That could be an old microserver just doing storage, an old tower with a few drives in it and either of those with the NUC sat in front of them doing the compute side, or a single box doing everything. Given the pricing at present, something 7th or ideally 8th gen intel or newer, enough drive bays to add extra storage and run storage and compute together. It'll use fractionally more power, but brings more compute to the table, a stronger iGPU, and is still relatively cheap/expandable given the used prices at present, for media at home UnRAID is the obvious choice, but if you are willing to spend the money on storage to do ZFS properly, and don't mind spinning up a full VDEV and paying the power bill, Proxmox will easily handle it, but i'd probably go a slightly different hardware route.

Also remember that if your data is important, back it up properly on, and off site, budget for things like a UPS and implement and actually test your automated shutdown process/restoration process.

 

[Jimbeam3678]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I should have added I have a beeline n150 nuc which has dual NVMe slots. So my plan was to run 512 gb and 2 gig internally and I have a mechanical drive in a powered usb caddie which I’ve been using for 2 years for Plex data with out issue.

Is there anything fundamentally wrong with the above? Proxmox is tempting but I’m not sure if I want to spend hours figuring stuff out. I’ve no doubt I’d get there in the end just depends how long it would take! Unraid seems to be the more user friendly option even if it is paid software.

Thank you again for the detailed reply