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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Perhaps my recent NAS/home server build can serve as a bit of an inspiration for you:

    • AMD Ryzen 8500G (8 cores, much more powerful than your two CPUs, with iGPU)
    • Standard B650 mainboard, 32 GB RAM
    • 2 x used 10 TB HDDs in a ZFS pool (mainboard has 4x SATA ports)
    • Debian Bookworm with Docker containers for applications (containers should be more efficient than VMs).
    • Average power consumption of 19W. Usually cooled passively.

    I don’t think it’s more efficient to separate processing and storage so I’d only go for that if you want to play around with a cluster. I would also avoid SD cards as a root FS, as they tend to die early and catastrophically.






  • I don’t have a Mac Mini, but for always-on systems, the idle power consumption can become quite significant.

    • Gaming PCs can consume up to 100W (876 kWh / year).
    • My AMD B650 NAS consumes about 17W in idle (150 kWh / year).
    • A NUC / Mac Mini can idle as low as 5W (44 kWh / year).

    If you pay 0.30$/kWh, running your old 100W gaming PC all the time would cost you 263$ per year. My NAS is 45$ per year…

    It also depends on what you need/want from the machine. The Mac Mini doesn’t have any HDDs and can’t run a regular Linux distro, for example.



  • I’ve also recently built my own NAS and I’ve gone through similar considerations. One of my mayor decisions was not to use btrfs because it’s not recommended for Raid Z1/Raid 5. With that, I landed on ZFS and TrueNAS Scale. Note that RAID expansion should be landing in both very soon.

    Things with TrueNAS were pretty easy, very quick, and everything worked nicely. However, I noticed that it was constantly accessing the disks and preventing them from spinning down. I really wanted to keep the power consumption low (<20 W idle), so I eventually decided to just go with Vanilla Debian + ZFS. I can recommend that if you want to tinker with things yourself. Otherwise, I’d recommend TrueNAS Scale.

    As for migration, you might be able to create a degraded pool initially, copy over the data, and add the parity disk last. Raid expansion would ofc also help there…