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Repurposing an old Alienware r8 (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 year ago by TacoEvent@lemmy.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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I have an old Alienware r8 and several 2-4 TB HDDs gathering dust in a closet. The Alienware actually runs remarkably quiet and it occurred to me I could turn it into a DIY NAS.

I’m not entirely sure where to start though. Some immediate questions:

What’s a good NAS OS to install?
Any fun things I can do besides plex transcoding with a 1080 GPU?
Would it make sense to run a Pixelfed/Mastodon server off this guy?
Can I run a RAID on it without buying a separate HDD bay?

Background:

I already have a Synology NAS running Plex. It transcodes 1080p fine which is really all I need it for.

Other than a Plex port forward, I have zero experience putting services out on the public web (but would like to learn!).

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[–] TacoEvent@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pretty sure it has 2 HDD bays, so I was thinking I would do something similar to the Synology Hybrid RAID on a 4TB drive. On retrospect though this might be way too crippling of a move for a play server, so I might forgo the RAID idea.

The Linux Upskill Challenge looks perfect! I feel comfortable with about 40% of the table of contents. Should be a fun weekend of experimenting.

Thanks for the help!

[–] MorphiusFaydal@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you've got two 3.5" bays, you could do a RAID 1 (or a mirror in ZFS terms) with them both. This works very nicely with a small SSD for booting. My TrueNAS server has a 120 GB SSD in the M.2 slot that TrueNAS is installed on, then I have an array of spinning disks that forms the main storage array.

If you are planning any sort of play environment that you might want to keep (like a Pixelfed instance) I'd strongly recommend RAID just for availability in the event of a drive failure. But more than that, backups. They are of number one importance. Before you turn up anything of any importance, figure out a backup strategy.

[–] TacoEvent@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks! I'll stick to the RAID 1 option then. I was looking at S3 Glacier for backup when it comes to that. But I really don't want to worry about it too much until I've really got something going that I plan to use longer term.