Raspberry pi: No. Or, at least, not without doing something to make sure you have a real storage backend and aren’t just running it off an SD card. The wear on SD cards is exaggerated and largely minimized if you use an OS that is configured to be aware of it but you are also increasingly relying on a ticking time bomb.
Mini PC/NUC? I am a huge fan of these and think they are what most people actually need for stuff like home assistant, adguard, etc. Just understand you are going to be storage limited sooner than you expect and you can oversubscribe that CPU and memory a lot faster than you would expect.
My general suggestion? Install proxmox on the mini PC and deploy on top of that. If/when you decide you want something more, migration is usually pretty easy.
And if you just want a NAS? It is really hard to go wrong with a 4 bay NAS from one of the reputable vendors (which may just be ugreen at this point?) as those tend to still come out cheaper than building it yourself and 4 disks means you can either play with fire with RAID5 or not be stupid and do RAID1.
And if you just want a NAS? It is really hard to go wrong with a 4 bay NAS from one of the reputable vendors (which may just be ugreen at this point?) as those tend to still come out cheaper than building it yourself and 4 disks means you can either play with fire with RAID5 or not be stupid and do RAID1.
Actually ASUS started to sell N100 motherboards with the CPU soldered on for $120
That plus a jonsbo N2 or N3, a few extra pieces, and its a few hundred dollars cheaper than the Ugreen options. Sure it will probably run Truenas instead of Ugreens custom truenas or whatever its built on, but that extra $300 is another 24TB hard drive or a HexOS lifetime subscription.
There’s also always the classic buy an old mid sized tower for $100 and slap two massive hard drives in it
I don’t have direct experience with them, but my understanding from youtubes is that the ugreen NASes are specifically designed for you to just ignore their OS and install your own (so truenas or proxmox).
Hardware tinkering is more limited but… there is very much a question of how much of that people actually do.
Raspberry pi: No. Or, at least, not without doing something to make sure you have a real storage backend and aren’t just running it off an SD card. The wear on SD cards is exaggerated and largely minimized if you use an OS that is configured to be aware of it but you are also increasingly relying on a ticking time bomb.
Mini PC/NUC? I am a huge fan of these and think they are what most people actually need for stuff like home assistant, adguard, etc. Just understand you are going to be storage limited sooner than you expect and you can oversubscribe that CPU and memory a lot faster than you would expect.
My general suggestion? Install proxmox on the mini PC and deploy on top of that. If/when you decide you want something more, migration is usually pretty easy.
And if you just want a NAS? It is really hard to go wrong with a 4 bay NAS from one of the reputable vendors (which may just be ugreen at this point?) as those tend to still come out cheaper than building it yourself and 4 disks means you can either play with fire with RAID5 or not be stupid and do RAID1.
Actually ASUS started to sell N100 motherboards with the CPU soldered on for $120
That plus a jonsbo N2 or N3, a few extra pieces, and its a few hundred dollars cheaper than the Ugreen options. Sure it will probably run Truenas instead of Ugreens custom truenas or whatever its built on, but that extra $300 is another 24TB hard drive or a HexOS lifetime subscription.
There’s also always the classic buy an old mid sized tower for $100 and slap two massive hard drives in it
Oh yeah, that is true. Mini PC has a proper ssd nvme.
Thanks for the feedback! Will look at the NAS you recommend, but i thik i want more freedom to tinker. Will definitely look into proxmox!
Just get a used PC and make a NAS. No need to buy a premade on.
I don’t have direct experience with them, but my understanding from youtubes is that the ugreen NASes are specifically designed for you to just ignore their OS and install your own (so truenas or proxmox).
Hardware tinkering is more limited but… there is very much a question of how much of that people actually do.
The first thing I did with my ugreen was install truenas, then learn how to use truenas.
While I’ve migrated several docker compose apps over, I feel I’m still learning the truenas part of the system.