I don’t know if it would give you as much hard drive space as you want, but I got an Odroid HC4 a while ago and it’s been great. One of the very few SBCs with two SATA slots ready to go.

I can’t say this is a good advice by itself; this is simply my setup as I was in your position just 1 month ago, maybe this gives you more ideas.

I recently bought an 16 GB non-ECC DDR5 (which is unnecessary, DDR4 works just fine) open-box 4-disk bay TerraMaster as my main server for the equivalent of around €400, thinking that in a distant future I can buy a different rack just for disks. This model has an Intel N150, which has the H.265 codec, which should handle the transcoding in your Plex instance (which, IMO, you should consider moving to Jellyfin instead in the new computer you end up getting). The 4-disk bay (there are some models with more bays) allows you to get some disks now and then fill up the bays later on if you want to. Note: I just realized this almost reads like a Terramaster ad, that’s not my goal; you can search for similar options from other fabricants.

As for the OS, I insist in recommending you TrueNAS, since it’s Debian-based, since it’s not like Proxmox where everything has to be VM, it’s simply Debian with a nice UI for spinning up Docker instances + disk/snapshot/backups management, all of which are optional: you can easily mount your disk pool and setup them up as a ZRAID (data redundancy in case of disk failure), stripe (no data redundancy), etc., organize everything in easy to use folders, schedule different snapshot schedules for different folders, etc. You can also easily mount Docker containers, either through the “app store” (a selection of Docker containers wrapped in a nice UI for configuration) or manually with docker-compose.yml files. IMO, you lose little, but gain a lot with the OS being already configured for a lot of the stuff you want to do, and the easy to use Web UI.

I can see you getting confused, seems to me you want 2 separate servers: a storage box and a services box. The services box would be doable for 500 euros - although ECC might throw a wrench in the works there. For a storage box, 500 euros won’t even buy the HDDs needed.

Previously had some good experience with this store selling refurbished hardware: https://www.computerstoreberlin.de/

My default suggestion is a used consumer PC (same gamer’s non-pre-built if possible bcs of the slightly better parts, but standard office shit works too), swap out the PSU for something top tier (by which I don’t mean super expensive, tho I do look at efficiency tests at low end bcs my serves idle a lot), and ofc storage for something enterprise.

For CPU it depends what you need, but idle power consumption of average desktop CPUs are pretty matched (no sense of getting a Pentium over eg i7), I would say (bcs of market prices & availability) some Intel 10+gen (i7? … but whatever really) or AMD 5000+ (I found a few 59x0 at good p/p value).

Consumer hardware is easier to work with & easier to make the rig silent for your usecase (that’s why I also like Exos & Red Plus drives). If you want additional quiets on top you can get a case with those (dense) foams.

Also crucially all my HDDs (even in early 2000s) have been in these 5.25" cages/adapters with fans (noisy drives give off noise directly & via case vibrations … also in one case I don’t even have them in 5" bays, they are just bolted to the bottom of the case):

(Various designs, I even made them diy 20 years ago, but they are super cheap today - the point being that the HDDs metal doesn’t touch the case, not even via a bolt.)

I prefer less redundancy in one server vs having two of them as copies (maybe have a secondary location) but cram as much as possible in one server bcs I don’t need more (router is a separate box, but out of practical & second-hand-finds reasons).

So my home lab has been raspberry pi’s of varying shapes and numbers for a few years. Recently my single floor condo flooded so half of my place has been ripped up and so much crap has been stuffed in the other half I decided I should get around to planning out a more complete home lab setup. Money is a bit tight but I called up my ISP and it turns out my internet package comes with two static IP addresses so I decided to snap those up. I will be building up a firewall with a pi 5, I will continue to use a pi 4 I have running HAOS, as I try to get out of all the ecosystems. I was born into the Apple ecosystem, the first computer I remember using was some old Apple DOS computer, so breaking out of that walled garden is going to be tough but it helps that Tim Apple gave Trump a golden Apple plaque so it hurts less with every service I turn off.

Any who because I have had a lot of time to make plans and game through my plan with AI I have decided I am going to self host my domain and email (Simple blog and 200+ annonomized email addresses) on a pi 5 that will be the third pi 5 after my firewall the first pi 5 will host things like immich, nextcloud, and the other things it is already doing one of those other things is pihole and that is where my DHCP is currently, I am on the fence about moving it to opnwrt or not. The Second pi 5 after the firewall also hosts a secondary pihole as a back up dns and all my high seas (like sonarr.tv) things and jellyfin.

To top it all off I am going to get another pi 4 with a hdd and I will ask for it to be hosted some where to do off site back ups.

if power bills are not an issue, maybe an older dell/hp workstation? noise and heat could be problematic though.

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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

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