Lenovo Thnkcentre Tiny or other tiny form factor PC for this, you can buy used/refurb on eBay or Amazon or wherever. quiet, low power, stackable, take up very little room, very cheap. mine are running with minimal Debian and Docker, mostly under 5% utilization.
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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im a firm believer in task appropriate stuff.. 24/7 server apps should be on a dedicated server box.. network storage should only perform storage tasks. i wouldnt use a primary workstation also as server cuz i want to do crazy shit on my workstation. i wouldnt ever want to interfere with my 'production' stuff on the server.
ive been quite happy running a headless server and various nas boxes for storage redundancy.. my home related i.t. tasks are very minimal now that everything is solidly automated.
Yep I changed my whole setup recently - had a Synology DS920+ running with docker containers for everything. I had started moving stuff off to a NUC because the NAS was starting to struggle.
What I ended up doing was buying a Mac Mini M4 and a DAS, and just running everything on the Mac with it running 24/7, and the DAS just acts like a giant HDD (and it’s running in RAID). Performance of everything is out of this world better, while power draw is significantly less. The Mac Mini M4 is unbeatable as a home server imo.
This is what I've been trying to figure out, so I'm glad you did it. I have a Synology too and I've outgrown it, but building my own server scratch is daunting so I just wanted to hook a DAS up to a mini PC and call it good. But there were a lot of people online saying it was a bad idea.
There are lots of people online who think they are smarter than they are haha
Doing it this way is super simple and comes with many benefits and pretty much zero drawbacks. Another huge benefit is you can then sign up to backblaze personal computer backup plans which give you unlimited data backups for like $10 a month. I currently have my entire media library along with my entire Mac Mini hard drive (over 40TB in total) backed up in backblaze. To do that with a NAS would cost me thousands of dollars a year.
There are ways to back up a NAS with the Backblaze personal plans.
The Mac Mini M4 is unbeatable as a home server imo.
How do you figure that?
It's insanely powerful yet sips power like a raspberry pi.
It has a full OS that is mainstream so it's easy to find any help you need.
It's the best bang for your buck machine on the market.
It can run everything you want a home server to run.
Do you disagree? Why?
Well, it's apple hardware and runs macos, so it's a bit kneecapped. It's not as flexible. But it is solid and you can run almost anything you can on Linux.
I wouldn't have even thought to purchase a new Mac anything as a server. That is definitely not their target use case.
What are you running at home that requires "insane power?" I'm running a servarr stack on an old Xeon that cost a fraction of a Mac mini and it works just fine. And I have room in the case for full size HDDs.
I've heard of people using old Mac mini as servers, and I guess whatever makes you happy. I definitely don't see how they're the ultimate home server.
Why not use the NAS as a NAS and pick up a cheap SFF or mini workstation for the compute tasks? Only reason I would ever consider running your endpoint as a server 24/7 is cost/availability of just adding a dedicated box.
Yeah, that is my standard way of doing things. Old desktop becomes the server, and it's specs blow everything I want it to do out of the water, so things like file storage (and the CPU required to encrypt-on-disk), etc have no chance of ever presenting an issue. Though, I do have a pair of Pis with POE hats on them (as well as a POE switch), because I really like POE.
Then I set it up for auto-updates and proceed to ignore it. Love very simple home networking setups that still accomplish every goal.
The dedicated NAS appliances really annoy me. Every time I have had to use one I just think 'I can just do this in Linux on any random desktop lying around, why am I learning another proprietary thing?'
@lIlIllIlIIIllIlIlII I don't have a NAS hardware. The only thing I have is 1 old PC that I'm using as a 24/7 server. And it's just AWESOME! I really encourage you to do it. I have a lot of self-hosted stuff and everything runs smoothly. Even Jellyfin and Frigate at the same time (Both use video encoding and decoding) on my CPU! Because my GPU is just so old (2012) that the system doesn't even recognize it.
Do you have any concerns about solid state storage life? Are you using any RAID?
@lIlIllIlIIIllIlIlII in my current setup I have 1 SSD and 3 HDDs. Not using any RAID. I still have plans to upgrade the hardware, which is something that isn't possible using NAS hardware. I need to change almost everything here. Better storage, better RAM and a compatible GPU. The only thing that I'm not worried for now is the CPU, it's doing a decent job handling everything alone, even 4k video encoding.
An rpi might work for your computer issues.
I'm in the same boat going the opposite way. I want to move my server stuff to separate hardware from my main PC.