homelab

Hello!

Recently i've been planning a home server with proper storage ability, but I got stuck at the details. I hope the experience in this community can help creating a proper plan on how to create my own (first) home server.

Motivation I've been using Cloud Services, especially Google Photos, for years now in order to store and share what i needed. However recently i'm trying to remove my dependency on cloud services and companies significantly, also with data privacy in mind. Therefor i'm planning to self host what i need.

Requirements

Energy Consumption I'm from a country where the energy prices exploded compared to the average salary. So the enegery consumption of the whole system, including storage and others, should be very low. i'm thinking 10 Watt or less in idle. I know it is challenging, therefor i'm asking for support.

Storage I actually do not need much. I estimated that 2TB are sufficient at a minumum. It should be redundant at least 1x, maybe with an additional cold storage added to the mix.

Compute Once i have a home server, it will not end with just storage. i'll probably have to run services like NextCloud or maybe some in direction of Home automation. I also might want to add security cameras to the mix (not long stored, just in case of incidents)

Initial Thoughts and Ideas

My initial idea was to use the Intel N300 with 8 cores and 6W TDP, however that chip does not seem to be released anytime soon. Therefor I was looking at the N100 with 4 cores and the same TDP. The N305 from Intel is interesting, but has higher energy consumption.

Next i looked at the mainboard options. There are some interesting MIni PCs with the N100, including some passive options, but they would only enable me to have max one M.2 and one SATA 2,5" drive, so I would need to see how i can add redundancy to it (or simply use both of these as SSDs with sufficient storage and call it a day, while adding a slow usb drive for additonal storage) There are also new mainboards from Asrock with N100s coming out, which look interesting as well, but would add costs for all the hardware required to run it.

Price wise HDDs would be the better option, however they since they use more energy, they might not be the ideal way for this build. I thought about it and if i add an SSD as the main storage which acts as a cache, i can use the hdds as simple backups. As i do not need them most of the time (once a day backup update would be suffficient) I could in theory power them off most of the time and only power them on for backup updates when needed. Do you know of any ways to handle this automatically for example via shell script? Most of what i found would require me to manually plug them back in via USB.

As for operating system etc. I've been thinking about Proxmox, TrueNas, NixOS and others. as i do not need VM's, most of my services will be available a container, the TrueNas with Docker / Podman Containers might be ideal. Adding full VMs to the system with only an N100 seems insufficient.

RAM: Most systems with the N100 go up to 16 GB. However I think 32GB would be better with many containers just to be future proof. It might be overkill.

Wake up on LAN support might be interesting too. I'm not sure if that would be supported by my choices so far.

Usage

Initially, the system would not be used most of the time. The most often action would most likely be syncing photos from iOS or Android automatically to storage (any recommendations for that?) as a picture or 2 migh be added daily. Everything else is infrequent, which the highest traffic on the system due to looking at the pictures.

Once it's running, this might change of course.

Summary

In summary, i'm just starting to plan this server and I would appreciate it, if you could give me some guidance on how to implement it the best way or point out mistakes i did in my thought process so far.

I also have a Raspberry Pi 4 that i can add to the mix, however it only has 4GB RAM, so it won't be able to do much alone.