My media, photos, and project files had ended up across too many services and drives. I wanted one box at home for backups, Plex, and the small self-hosted things I like trying out.
Hardware
The build uses an ASRock N100DC-ITX board with Intel’s N100 processor. It is powerful enough for my workload without turning into an electricity bill I need to think about.
- Case: white Jonsbo N2
- RAM: 8 GB DDR4
- Cache: 1 TB WD Red SN700 NVMe
- Array: 8 TB HGST Ultrastar He8 and 8 TB Seagate IronWolf
- Cooling: Noctua NF-A12x25
The array uses Unraid parity, so one disk can fail without taking everything with it. Longer term, I plan to replace the drives with four 24 TB disks.
Why Unraid
I chose Unraid because it handles mixed-size disks well, gives me parity protection, and has a straightforward web interface. Docker is also easy to run and manage there.
What runs on it
- Plex for media.
- Immich for phone photos and videos.
- Home Assistant for smart-home bits.
- DuckDNS and Nginx Proxy Manager for remote access and SSL.
- Tautulli for Plex stats.
Each service has its own volumes and ports. That sounds obvious, but it makes updates and troubleshooting much less painful.
The annoying parts
NAS drives are louder than I expected. Better fans and fan curves helped, but they are still NAS drives. I also spent more time than expected on ports, volumes, network settings, and deciding what belonged on cache versus the array.
Where it stands
The NAS does not need to be exciting. It stores files, backs up photos, streams media, and gives me somewhere to run services. That is enough. The useful bit is having one machine with a clear job instead of buying more cloud storage and hoping I remember where things are.