NAS and computing as a single server or separated? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Past-Hovercraft2314 · 2023-12-20 02:35 Hello everyone, I am currently trying to figure out what kind of hardware I need for my new home server solution. I am torn between two options: a single server that serves as a NAS and serves the various services I want or seperating those instances, have a NAS server and a computation server. Here are the main services I want to run on my homelab: * Ollama (language model) * Jellyfin * Stable diffusion * Syncthing * Minecraft server **Concerns to the separation approach** I am concerned that the separation approach will complicate my setup and hurt the performance. I am most likely going to go with a gigabit switch, will this create a noticeable decrease in performance? **Why would I separate the NAS from the server?** Firstly, I would want to use trueNas, and multiple services I want do not go well with freeBSD. Secondly, I have an old thinkstation I could reuse for the NAS, there would be minimal added costs to this approach. **Hardware** I am also looking as to what kind of hardware I should get. What would you recommend for the hardware running the different AI tools plus other services? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- pacific_fist · 2023-12-20 03:45 I just repurposed a ThinkStation as a Proxmox host running TrueNAS in a VM with a pass thru to a SATA card. Plex is going on the same machine in a separate VM. I harvested the SATA card from my previous, dead PSU server and saved the computer, hard drives and some extra RAM from the recycler. How you proceed is really up to you, your goals and how much you want to invest in the project. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vluhdz · 2023-12-20 03:52 This was going to be my suggestion, Proxmox. OP, if for whatever reason you don't want to use Proxmox, you could also use TrueNAS and run a Linux VM on it for your other stuff ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thundranos · 2023-12-20 04:01 I run my nas on Ubuntu and about 50 containers. Works great. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Adures_ · 2023-12-20 11:15 That depends on how much data you currently have, but it looks like you need dedicated server more than NAS, since you mostly focus on services. I'd probably create dedicated machine with XCP-ng or proxmox as hypervisor, with enough SSD storage for your current needs. **Concerns to the separation approach** Performance hit is not really noticeable if you do not try to use your NAS storage for VM system drives. For example with Jellyfin, you'd have VM / container hosted on machine 1 (server) but all your media like movies and tv shows on NAS. In that scenario you wouldn't really notice performance hit. With something like language models I imaging you'd want to keep the dataset locally on the server, but I haven't done it myself so not sure. ​ **Why would I separate the NAS from the server?** 1. Backups, it's easier to recover when your VM breaks 2. You can separate the data from services. Usually you want services to run on fast SSD, your data can be on slower, cheaper HDD. 3. One solution can't be best at everything. NAS is better at keeping your data safe with data scrubbing, easy drive monitoring, data compression and so on. It's not as good or feature rich at managing compute resources. It usually also has less compute resources available (if you decide to buy NAS instead of building it). 4. My personal reason - I have over-complicated home setup with multiple VLANs, firewall rules, separate server and NAS. It's too complicated for other people at home. However all important data is kept on Synology NAS which is moderately easy to use even for non IT person. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- brandontaylor1 · 2023-12-20 23:34 I prefer to keep the server and NAS separate. It allows me a lot more flexibility for server upgrades, and experimentation, without have to worry about losing or migrating my data.