I don’t plan on having more than 7-8 services running: Immich, Nextcloud+office, firefly, audiobookshelf, paperless and a maybe few more if they’re useful.

This will change when you get confidence and start realising how much good stuff is out there.

I’m a noob with this stuff who has recently self learned stuff and got a decent server setup running. Feel free to DM if you want detail about my beginner resources, how, what and any other questions.

I started with a Synology NAS. I don’t know about your specific NAS, but NAS hardware can be underpowered and quickly becomr too underpowered for the stuff you want to deploy.

People online recommended a mini PC for and keeping the NAS as just a NAS. I thought I better double check what’s suitable for my needs…R.Pi, DIY build server computer, NUC , Unraid, TrueNAS, HexOS, etc.

So I put in loads of work to come round to realising the initial recommendations was correct. I’ve kept my Synology for only NAS and use a dedicated mini PC. I’ve put Debian on it as my server OS. No RAID configurations, but critical data is backed up across 2 to 3 different devices and media.

Super happy (and quite proud) of my setup. It is slowly expanding.

I would recommend taking it slow, document steps you take (because you will fuck up and need to redo things), backup all important data and keep it completely detached from the devices you’re tinkering with, find suitable and appropriate beginner guides. Don’t go underpowered, and don’t get caught up with very advanced user setups with huge overkill.

It really has been a lot of fun. Welcome inside the rabbit hole.

You’re incredibly wrong on your assumptions here.

First of all, ZFS (the file system TrueNAS specialises for) is best used with at least 3-4 disks. The more the better. A dual disk setup for ZFS (or any other kind of RAID) is super wasteful.

Second, no, 4TB won’t be enough. You think it is today, but soon you’ll be downloading media Linux ISOs and quickly realise that even 16TB is a stretch within a year.

My recommendation would be going for at least 4x 4TB, but 3-4x 6TB or even 8TB would be probably preferred. And similarly, I’d rather overshoot the initial purchase rather than realise 6-8 months in that oops, the 2-4 disk system you got isn’t enough… Even if you don’t fill the bays, I’d recommend you go for at least a 4 bay system, but rather, for 6. Sadly, SOHO NASes aren’t designed with easy expandability down the line.

Two 4tb disks in raid 1 is a waste of money for most selfhosters. Unless you really want to avoid downtime due to disk failure. (and even then you could get a power outage or a network failure). A second disk will protect you from disk failure but not from other forms of data loss (like you fucking up something and erasing all of your family photos).

Do you also plan to buy some cold storage medium and cloud storage or a remote backup server or something (for 3+2+1 backups)? thats way more important.

Ive got an office pc with a 9th gen intel i3 4 core, 16gb RAM, you can propably find one for 100-200 dollars. Ive installed a 4TB NVMe into it.

For nightly remote backups i have a pi with another 4TB NVMe(overkill for sure, you could use pretty much anything for this) and for cold store i have 4TB external that i plug in when i remember.

I run docker and immich, nextcloud+office, jellyfin + a bunch of smaller services. I could perhaps use a little bit a better gpu for jellyfin transcoding sometimes with certain 4k files. Otherwise no need for upgrades.

I think it would be fine. Friend of mine has Immich on a N100, like you mentioned, the initial ML tasks on a big library takes over 24 hours but once it’s done it doesn’t need much. I don’t have experience running next cloud but the others you mentioned don’t need much RAM/CPU.

ZFS doesn’t need much RAM, especially for a two disk 4TB mirror. It soaks up free RAM to use as a cache which makes people think it needs a lot. If the cache is tiny you just end up hitting the actual speed of the HDDs more often, which sounds within your expectations. I dare say you could get by with 8 GB, but 16GB would be plenty.

I’d only point out if you’re looking for it to last 10 years, a neat package like the ugreen might bite you. A more standard diy PC will have more replaceable parts. Would be bigger and more power hungry though.

Your only choice would be a mirror, as you only have two bays. RAIDZ2 needs at least 4 drives to be useful.

Have you checked that you can actually run a different OS on the UGREEN NAS?

Considering the services you want to run on the machine you’ll want all the RAM you can get.

Also, the CPU is already weak by today’s standard, especially with “heavier” workloads like Immich machine learning.

@bordam Personally I would suggest, take so much Ram as you have money available.
If you have services relying on databases like Nextcloud (Valkey / Redis, MariaDB / PostgreSQL) more RAM could be helpful.
My current not finished setup with podman containers already takes 2 GB Ram.
Also prices for Ram and SSDs are predicted to rise or are already rising, so if you buy now, I would suggest to buy maximal large hardware parts.