My current setup is a NAS running on an old Acer Aspire laptop with an Intel core i5-6500u and 8GB RAM (and an Nvidia 920m but I'm pretty sure its not using that as I'm running headless Ubuntu server and haven't installed the Nvidia drivers) with a 3.5" HDD plugged in via USB.
The main things I like about this setup are that its cheap (I already own it), fairly low power, and pretty quiet. I guess the built in UPS is a bonus as well!
The main reason I want to upgrade is so I can easily add more drives, either for redundancy or just more storage. The USB can also be a bit janky, sometimes after first powering on it fails to read the drive and I have to power off the hard drive caddy for about a minute, this does seem to be an issue with the devices itself though as I've had it do it with multiple drives in multiple PC's. It would also be nice to get the laptop back even though I don't use it much.
Currently its just acting as a NAS, but I would definitely like to set up Jellyfin as well. I'm potentially interested in hosting my own private Lemmy or Matrix instance, however since that would involve exposing my network to the internet I'd need to be 100% sure I could set it up securely so I may not bother. I might also set up a Minecraft server in the future but I don't have any plans to do that soon.
With those use cases in mind I figured low power draw is probably more important than loads of computing power. I'm really tempted by the ASRock N100M with either 8 or 16GB RAM, its slightly more powerful than what I've got now while being based on much newer architecture with a lower power draw. I think it would also allow for hardware transcoding in Jellyfin that isn't supported by my current CPU? Also fanless seems like a bonus. I'd probably pair that with the Fractal Design Node 804 which would come to around £250 total plus whatever I spend on a PSU. That would let me start off with 2 drives (which I already own) and easily add more with a PCIe expansion card later, however I'm not sure what power supply would go with this. It wouldn't need much power but there doesn't seem to be many options below 500W. Also is it worth going for a higher power rating with an 80 plus gold rating for more efficiency and potentially less fan noise? I did look at PicoPSU as a low wattage alternative but by the time you buy a DC power supply for it they seem to be not far off the price of a proper PSU for something thats a lot less capable, probably less efficient and looks very Janky. The other option is to go for the N100DC-ITX instead of the N100M as it used DC power instead of needing an ATX PSU, however that would limit how many drives I can add in the future as I'd need to find a way of powering them.
I've also looked at single board computers as another low power alternative. I was tempted by the Zimaboard or Zima Blade but the CPU on those seems outdated and under powered (it would be a step down from what I already have) and that really would limit me to 2 drives maximum. I also looked at the Odroid H3/H3+ but they seem to cost just as much if not more than the N100 options and tbh I think the cases are quite ugly. I'd rather stick with x86 than ARM unless someone can convince me otherwise!
With what I've said above do you think its worth upgrading to any of those options (or any other suggestions) or should I just stick with what I've got until it dies? Power supply suggestions would also be appreciated!
I went for the ASRock J5040 board, 16gb ram a 500gb m.2 as system using a PCI adapter , 2x4tb ironwolf as ZFS mirror pool, 350 W power supply all in the node 304 fractal case for 550 euro altogether.
Runs proxmox as hypervisor for VM or Container. 6 LXC running motioneye, plex, pyload with openvpn, syncthing, rclone cloud backup and openbookshelf.
Typical power usage is around 20W
That said it could also run on PicoPSU
Do you ever wish you had more processing power or does it do everything you need?
Not yet. All of the LXC containers run on 2 cores of the 4 and 2gb of RAM and 512MB swap where reserved. I can address more power if needed.
As none of my services run constant on full power the low power of the CPU is not a problem. I serve only my home with it.
I have been running a Synology NAS, 416 play with a Celeron n3060 (I think) dual core with 8GB ram.
It runs all my docker services (around 20) with no issues. Containers are more RAM bound than CPU. Uses about 40-45 ℅ of the RAM.
The only limit is when transcoding as suppose to Direct playing a movie. Then it really taxes the CPU. But I don't really watch movies so its a non issue.
So a NAS doesn't need a beefy CPU if used as a file server. Can be tricky if you run Plex on it though depending on your codecs.