Mini pc servers/nas

[Pickers]

Bear with me with this - it's a story of evolving thought and I wonder if anyone has advice...

Fundamentally, is anyone using a mini pc as a NAS? What is the experience like?

Anyway, I currently have a microserver Gen8 running Unraid with a 256gb SSD cache drive, and two WD reds 2tb, one as parity the other as storage which is work files and photos (auto backed up from the phones in the family). I plug in an external HDD and it runs rsync to backup data from time to time. I don't really need advanced nas features, just some local centralised storage. I also run a pi 3b+ for home assistant and, a pi b for pihole and a pi zeroW for secondary pihole.
So I wanted to cut out the pis and move HA and pihole into VMs in Unraid. I have a 1265L V2 CPU ready to use to upgrade the Gen8 so that it can cope with VMs. It already has 16Gb RAM.
Now the issue is the gen8 currently runs at 35 Watts, dropping to 30 when I spin down the disks. I'm reluctant to have this running 24 7 at this power, especially as with VMs I can't see the disks being able to spin down so much. This would equate to over £100 in electricity costs annually.
So instead I started looking at the possibility of getting a mini pc, something like a beelink eq12, n100, 500gb ssd and running VMware on it. This has a idle of 10W give or take 3W. Much nicer.

But then I still have the gen8 as my nas which I could continue to power up from time to time to save money BUT I wondered how feasible it would be together create a new Nas on the mini pc and let the gen8 go to pasture totally. Either my moving my Unraid OS to it and rebuilding with ssds as I couldn't use the WD reds unless I got an external enclosure, but then how to connect - esata, thunderbolt... so I figured I was going to end up overcomplicating this all.

So could a mini pc do VMs for the pis and also have an SSD which is just shared as a network storage drive?

Lots to make sense of so thanks if you followed me through!!

 

[El Pew]

So could a mini pc do VMs for the pis and also have an SSD which is just shared as a network storage drive?

The short version is yes. There are a whole slew of ultra small form factor (USFF) boxes that can do pretty much what you're after. I have, for example, several of the Intel NUC 12th Gen machines which have space for an NVMe drive which can be anything up to 4TB, a 2.5" slot which can hold a 4TB SSD (or spinning rust if you want to keep costs down), and 2 RAM slots which can take up to 64GB of RAM. Full specs here: https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...nuc-12-pro-kit-nuc12wshi3/specifications.html There are even Celeron-based equivalents which are cheaper and draw even less power at the expense of some performance.

You could easily install Proxmox or another hypervisor on the NVMe, expose the 2.5" drive to a TrueNAS VM that then gives you NAS-style capabilities whilst at the same time running other VMs to do whatever else you might need. Or install Unraid and then run containers for Pihole etc. Lots of options there.

If you don't like the look of the NUCs then you can look up Lenovo ThinkCentre, Dell Optiplex or HP EliteDesk Minis of a recent vintage, they all have very similar capabilities with 2 drive options and up to 64GB of memory in a slightly bigger packages than the NUC. They all run laptop class chips so the power draw is fairly minimal, and 3-5 year old ones can be had on eBay for not a lot of outlay if you're okay with second-hand. I've never used Beelink boxes but I guess they'd be very similar.

This YouTube channel has an entire series dedicated to these small boxes, might be worth a watch of some of them to get some ideas: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC53fzn9608B-MT5KvuuHct5MiUDO8IF4

 

[Pickers]

This is really helpful!

I know if I use Unraid, I wouldn't be able to have a cache AND parity drive (unless I were to I remove any PCIe WiFi card and then use adapter to use a second M2 drive), but then I probably don't need parity for my use anyway... eek.

I need to swot up on what a hypervisor is too... steep learning curve maybe!!

 

[El Pew]

This is really helpful!

I know if I use Unraid, I wouldn't be able to have a cache AND parity drive (unless I were to I remove any PCIe WiFi card and then use adapter to use a second M2 drive), but then I probably don't need parity for my use anyway... eek.

I need to swot up on what a hypervisor is too... steep learning curve maybe!!

A hypervisor is basically "a thing you run virtual machines on" - VMWare ESXi is one, Hyper-V and Proxmox are the other typically used ones. I like Proxmox myself but I've used the others and they all have similar capabilities.

I've never used Unraid but I think you would struggle to get a system, data and parity drives in one of these small boxes in a way that makes sense. If data resiliency is something you really care about there are probably better options including retaining your existing server as a backup target. It is important to understand the risks that you face and the mitigations that parity will give you versus backups. Parity, for example, will not help you if you experience a ransomware attack that locks all your files, but an offline backup should. Conversely a backup system would not help you detect and recover from data corruption like bitrot but parity should. Neither of these options would help you in the event of a burglary or a house fire that causes you to lose everything, but a cloud backup would.

 

[Pickers]

A hypervisor is basically "a thing you run virtual machines on" - VMWare ESXi is one, Hyper-V and Proxmox are the other typically used ones. I like Proxmox myself but I've used the others and they all have similar capabilities.

I've never used Unraid but I think you would struggle to get a system, data and parity drives in one of these small boxes in a way that makes sense. If data resiliency is something you really care about there are probably better options including retaining your existing server as a backup target. It is important to understand the risks that you face and the mitigations that parity will give you versus backups. Parity, for example, will not help you if you experience a ransomware attack that locks all your files, but an offline backup should. Conversely a backup system would not help you detect and recover from data corruption like bitrot but parity should. Neither of these options would help you in the event of a burglary or a house fire that causes you to lose everything, but a cloud backup would.

You are speaking language that I understand and makes sense. I am close to pulling the trigger on a beelink EQ12. I'd like an optiplex but the eq12 is more modern and guaranteed lower power. (That and the number of models of a optiplex is overhelming on selecting a a good one)

 

[Pickers]

I've ordered the beelink eq12...