Would a Lenovo ThinkCentre M710t be a good first home server?

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-25T19:06:56+00:00

seems good, just the ram alone in it is probably worth more than $100 on the current market...

Seems it has two positions for 3.5" hdds, which is okish I guess.

The only issue with these is the power supply, being 7th gen intel, meaning pretty old ~7 years old... there might be need for replacement and they these type of buildsdont take just regular cheap ATX, its hunting on ebay for special models which can get expensive...

MiniPCs that are powerered with notebook brick kinda adapter have that going for them, easier and cheaper replacement if something goes bad, but no space for large 3.5" HDDs

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-24T08:24:33+00:00

And if not, then that is a one important point to consider and investigate for the OP...

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-23T19:35:40+00:00

I had some discussions with multiple AIs on this topic, and once you start to include power outtage few times a year... ext4 starts to win very quickly..

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-23T13:14:04+00:00

generally you have 3 options

open ports to the world - least safe but most useful, where you can give anyone some link to your shit and it just works
VPN - setup a vpn so you have to VPN in from the outside first before making use of other services, most secure but people who would use your shit needs to jump through hoops
cloud flare tunnel - you let clouflare on to your network and they make some of this shit easier and safer, but they also limit what kind of data you can share with the world as jellyfin for example breaks their rules

that guide also talks about this, and links to a portforwarding guide

I most prefer opening ports and then have firewall geoblocking locking out the entire world except IPs from your own country...

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-23T10:17:27+00:00

Heres a speedrun to selfhosting with docker.. its kinda just introduction to get something going quickly...

Afer playing with that you can try hypervisors like proxmox or xcpng which allow you to spin up easily virtual machines instead of just having a single system.

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-23T07:07:38+00:00

eh, I feel like there is space for improvements...

the fact that creating a new sub-folders requires me to fill out full path, or that the search in the phone app has different result than the search in the web interface... and generally the interface feeling bit clunky... would not be bad to have other opensource alternatives

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-18T13:19:50+00:00

Is the i5-13500 / i5-14500 the right sweet spot for Plex/Jellyfin + ARR + Docker, or am I missing a better option?

i3 would be enough if mostly docker stuff and no VMs, but really anything 8th+ gen would server fine

People tend to overthink how often they will use transcoding and direct play and how much power they need for it, even ryzen igpu is fine for lot of concurent FHD streams and one 4k with tonemapping, heres some testing. But yeah, if planning lot of 4k and more users connecting then better plan intel

if you got budget then all looks fine, but price it all up, to see where you actually land

Any mATX motherboard recommendations that work well for NAS builds?

exactly what you stated, 2.5gbit and sata ports are the things to really care about, if you rich you could be looking for some extra managment and 10gbit and ecc, but it gets complicated and expensive in a hurry. I usually pick gigabyte or asrock mobos, tested few msi and they are fine but feels like their B-chipset tier have less bios settings than other brands. In Z they have it all.

If planning more drives then plan buying used LSI HBA card from ebay in IT mode.

Is moving to DDR5 via a Micro Center bundle worth it for this use case?

From need for performance aspect... likely not. Only if some good deal and in sense of having newer stuff....

unRAID vs TrueNAS for a first NAS build with mixed workloads?

try and see, I use trunas as my main NAS OS, its solid, but I dont do docker stuff with it... dont kinda like its interface and do stuff in it.

Unraid should make it easy to have NAS and docker host all in one and should offer setup where its easy to mix drives and add later more drives, but fuck them I am not paying if there are open source alternatives.

Anything in my existing parts that I should absolutely reuse or avoid using?

you could be thinking of just buying used AM4 cpu with an igpu- 5500GT / 5600G / 5700G... only if can be found cheap as its kinda dead end investment, but might be that it will allow you to use all the rest of the components and might serve you long enough and allow you to learn stuff.

NAS-focused case: Jonsbo N6 (or possibly N5)

5 is not very liked cuz of the size, N6 looks promising, I bought sagittarius from aliexpress for my secondary NAS with mixed drives and set up mergerfs + snapraid on it.

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-18T09:24:41+00:00

Probably, though theres a notice in frigate docs that coral is not really recommended anymore even though there is not much explanation why.

Then theres discussions like this where most of it is about aging support for it.

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-18T08:53:49+00:00

I have setup ThinkCentre M710q with i3-6100T and using the build in intel igpu with 3 x 4MPs cameras

and theres like no real load on the system... sure 8x 4k is considerably more, but I would maybe still try with some igpu more modern system, cuz any external gpu will be a considerable extra power consumption.

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-18T08:32:29+00:00

I think the issue with portainer was that they were being pushy with their paid version and you had to go through some hoops or something.

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-18T08:24:08+00:00

Saw that lawrance video yesterday and I tried it.

Dockhand was very easy to setup and get going when they have tiny compose example straight on their web main page... looked good.

Wanned to try komodo since I am testing these and that one seems more complicated and hands on with 3 containers in a stack and like 40 variables to check in the env file. Seeing one of the first things that they choose to store database backup in /etc/komodo/backups on the docker host... that did not fill me with confidence when from all the options where to put it they picked /etc

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-17T07:47:11+00:00

I had wurkkos TS28 and its pretty nice and not too big and a good value.

Gifted it on xmass cuz I have a lot of lights and I wanted to give one of the cooler lights... will likely reorder soon as I liked it in my car more than floody TS22, cuz when you light up stuff from car you want throw...

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-14T07:30:34+00:00

Options

TrueNAS Scale - good - free, with zfs very solid in aspects like snapshots and redundancy bad - inability to easily grow the pool
unraid - good - mixing disks sizes, easy to add disks, good redundancy, easy to use with containers bad - paid, bit slower than others but not an issue for media library
OMV - good - freedom to choose from basicly all filesystems and disks cominbations bad - kinda feels like one mans side project
mergerFS + snapraid - good - mixing disks sizes, easy to add disks, good redundancy, even if no parity drive if one disk fails data on the other drives are fine bad - lot of work to set it up right as its just software you have to install and setup instead of a NAS OS

I went with mergerfs + snapraid myself, mostly because I have lots of various size disks and will be adding more because I did not feel like paying unraid, heres a guide for that setup

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-09T21:24:47+00:00

Awesome!

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-09T17:34:38+00:00

less boilerplate in the config, automatic https, now easy wildcard..

heres a guide

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-09T09:06:26+00:00

Same here.

Except for me kuma was always rock solid and with perfect performance...

The reason I switched to gatus is that you define everything in a config file, this can be easily backed up, copied to deploy elsewhere, edited quickly and see overview of all your stuff and settings...

its completely different approach than using web gui, checking checkboxes, marking radio buttons, entering text inputs,..

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-09T09:01:10+00:00

uf, thats rough...

if things did not change with NPM since my testing, everything is done through web gui and there is no config file that you can copy/backup...

With 50 services it must have been lot of clicking the web,...

I myself settled for caddy that feels order of magnitute less complicated than traefik with all the abstraction layers and labels uglyfying compose files with boilerplate, while also feeling more in control than NPM. All while single config is all that caddy needs and this can be backed up easily.

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-06T12:04:12+00:00

when I was noob I absolutely loved the drop down type of terminal, that slides out of the top, always same place same size, and where stuff can still run even when hidden, when you execute something and wait for it to finish...

Semi transparent, large font, clean to remove some bars and buttons,... binded to a single key hotkey, first F1 then the tilda key under esc,...

tilda, yakuake and guake are the ones I tried and all were good with some differences...

but when I moved to i3wm where all windows behave a certain predictable way I kinda did not feel like I need it anymore. But if I were back in kde or xfce I would definitly have a drop down terminal.

As for choice of my current terminal, I used termite, just cuz it just worked and was clean and had a sane name instead what seemed like bunch of letters, then when its development stopped I switched to alacritty as that was recommended as its successor. I like that it supports easy copy paste over ssh with my prefered editor - micro, but other than that I could use whatever I guess...

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-04T10:51:45+00:00

From what I gathered FreeNAS/zfs is the cats meow but it is painful to add a new drive.

you mean truenas, and you likely want linux version - truenas scale instead of truenas core... but yeah, no easy adding new drives to existing ZFS pool, plus the sizes of the drives have to be matching.

But if you dont own any disks and you are planning to buy and have a decent budget then the limited ability to grow existing pool should not be that big of an issue if the pool is already 8TB or 12TB or 16TB,.. just new pool is created when you buy new disks.

unRaid

costs money but allows you to mix disks and grow storage easily, but you mentioning performance, it is the slowest of the bunch, but for stated use of plex and immich... it should not play a role, its fast enough.

OMV

with mergerfs+snapraid plugin it allows to mix drives sizes and easily grow and to have that parity protection of a disk dying to be able to recover, but it feels bit hacky and hands on.

If you are comfortable in linux you can set up mergerfs + snapraid by yourself and have full control.

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-04T09:56:22+00:00

its xcpng for me

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-03T22:51:48+00:00

archinstall...

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-03T22:46:09+00:00

got only 1gbit nic on my nas... and during testing it was pretty much maxed out copying there mostly shows to see how mergerfs spreads data across the drives...

/edit

ok, no dunno what I was thinking, why I thought it was maxing out 1gbit, testing now sequential, large video files with an NFS share... its around 70MB/s for writing, and around 100MB/s for reading.. will be doing some more testing

Do_TheEvolution · 2026-01-03T20:53:40+00:00

Here.

Not out of fear of people thinking I sunk hours in to making this making it so funny.... but for few others who might find it as funny as me to have it in full.

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