Hello I’ve been playing around with an old laptop as my home server for 1 year and I think that now it’s a good time to upgrade to something better since it feels a bit too slow.

I was thinking to buy a synology but I would prefer something custom because I hate that sometimes the manufacturers decide to abandon support or change all their terms of service.

My budget is about 1000$ USD, I’m looking for it to have at least 20TB and the option to later add a graphics card would be nice.

What do you recommend to buy? Also what software do you recomend? Also could it work with an n100 mini PC?

I’ve been using Ubuntu server, with docker containers for several services, but I mainly use it for Nextcloud

  • @pezhore@infosec.pubEnglish
    2•1 month ago

    Ceph is… fine. I feel like I don’t know it enough to properly maintain it. I only went with 10gbe because I was basically told on a homelab reddit that Ceph will fail in unpredictable ways unless you give it crazy speeds for it’s storage and network. And yet, it has perpetually complained about too many placement groups.

    1 pools have too many placement groups

Pool tank has 128 placement groups, should have 32

    Aside from that and the occasional falling over of monitors it’s been relatively quiet? I’m tempted to use use the Synology for all the storage and let the 10GbE network be carved up into VM traffic instead. Right now I’m using bonded USB 1GbE copper and it’s kind of sketchy.

    • nickwitha_k (he/him)English
      2•1 month ago

      I maintained a CEPH cluster a few years back. I can verify that speeds under 10GbE will cause a lot of weird issues. Ideally, you’ll even want a dedicated 10GbE purely for CEPH to do its automatic maintenance stuff and not impact storage clients.

      The PGs is a separate issue. Each PG is like a disk partition. There’s some funky math and guidelines to calculate the ideal number for each pool, based upon disks, OSDs, capacity, replicas, etc. Basically, more PGs means that there are more (but smaller) places for CEPH to store data. This means that balancing over a larger number of nodes and drives is easier. It also means that there’s more metadata to track. So, really, it’s a bit of a balancing act.