Currently, I am in the process from moving from a dual xeon cpu poweredge with 128GB of RAM running Proxmox, to a N100 white-label NAS motherboard I got for $120 off AliExpress running Unraid. This may sound like a crazy proposition, but hear me out.

  1. Power - Big enterprise hardware is meant to be used and abused. Therefore, its idle power consumption is not really a concern. This means that even though I am only using 1% of the CPU at idle, I am still using ~200 watts, and if I do start taxing it, it can easily for towards 1000 watts.
  2. 3.5" Hard Drives - All of the servers I own are 1U servers, and only have 2.5" drive bays. Although I do not need nearly as much compute as I have available on the power edge, I do want to upgrade my storage. Most of my data is kept on a Synology DS220+ with 2x 6TB Western Digital Red drives in RAID 0 (I know this is insane and want to change it, thats part of what we are doing here). The plan is to setup the N100 as my primary NAS, which will have 12 SATA ports and will be in a case large enough to handle lots of 3.5" drives. Then I can convert the Synology to RAID 1 and use it for backups.
  3. Unraid for array expandability - My Synology could only take 2 hard drives. The big benefits of Unraid for me will be the ability to add more drives at a later date, and being able to mix drive sizes. I have a spare 6TB drive, a ton of 1TB SSDs, and two 12TB used enterprise hard drives on the way.

My main concern is that I won’t have enough computer. Sure, I can always still boot up the big servers if I have a large task I need to handle, but they can’t stay running 24/7 since the point of all this is to lower power consumption. To help this, I am going to get my RPi 5 which has been collecting dust on a shelf setup as well. Most of what I currently have running in the lab are docker containers, so it will be easy to migrate some of those workloads to the Pi. I also have an old i3 NUC from 2015 I could boot up if I need to as well, but I would rather avoid it since it needs a new drive and probably isn’t worth the investment.

I am currently still waiting for the board to come in, and I will make a post going over the new setup once it arrives!