chazwhiz

I'm way over-analyzing at this point, so I'd love any suggestions or advice on approaching this new setup.

Today I run OpenMediaVault 7 on an i5 NUC with a cheap USB enclosure with 4x8TB in RAID5 (Hardware RAID, which I greatly regret).

Upgrading to a Minisforum N5 NAS Pro with 5x22TB and 3x4TB NVMEs.

My primary use is media which is the vast bulk of storage. I also point some Time Machine backups at it and use it to archive "what if I need this someday" stuff from old external drives we've used over the years. But all the critical stuff is also sent to Backblaze, so this is not primary backup per se, more for the local convenience.

I have decided against Proxmox, so this will be OMV (or maybe Unraid) bare metal. I've also ruled out TrueNAS. Proxmox and TrueNAS both just add too many new "pro" layers I don't really want to deal with.

I'm considering:

Setup 1:

• 3 of the drives in mergerfs for media storage (all the stuff that annoying at most if lost), maybe SnapRAID.
• 2 drives in RAID 1 for all the more important stuff like documents, user shares (which nobody in the house uses today except me), and the backups
• 1 SSD as bcache for each of the above?

Setup 2:

• RAID5 the whole thing again.
• No idea what to do with the SSDs in this case, bcache again? Can you mirror + bcache SSDs?

Setup 3:

• Take the ZFS plunge - My only real concern is the overhead (plus having zero experience with it). This machine will handle it fine (96GB RAM) BUT I was hoping to be able to leverage most of that RAM to do some Local LLM stuff. Nothing crazy, but I worry about ZFS reducing my ability to do that.
• ZFS has built in tools to incorporate the SSDs as cache right?

Setup 4:

• Switch to Unraid. I like OMV, but I can dig the "simplification" of Unraid.
• 5 Drives in array (1 parity) plus nvmes for cache.

The caching stuff I clearly don't understand but I'm very interested in. I'm thinking about it mostly in "download and consume immediately" situations. Today I have a huge bottleneck in unpacking and moving. I've got 1gb fiber and can saturate it, getting a complete iso in just a few minutes, but then it's another 30min plus waiting for that to actually be usable.

Again, I've completely paralyzed myself with all the options, so slap me out of it with whatever you've got.

For instance an RPI that just boots straight to a full screen browser with nothing else. I’ve used Magic Mirror but I want to switch to a web based dashboard instead.

Edit to clarify: Specifically talking about a cheap computer and monitor setup, not a tablet and touch controls won’t matter.

In the next ~6 months I’m going to entirely overhaul my setup. Today I have a NUC6i3 running Home Assistant OS, and a NUC8i7 running OpenMediaVault with all the usual suspects via Docker.

I want to upgrade hardware significantly, partially because I’d like to bring in some local LLM. Nothing crazy, 1-8B models hitting 50tps would make me happy. But even that is going to mean a beefy machine compared to today, which will be nice for everything else too of course.

I’m still all over the place on hardware, part of what I’m trying to decide is whether to go with a single machine for everything or keep them separate.

Idea 1 is a beefy machine and Proxmox with HA in a VM, OMV or TrueNAS in another, and maybe a 3rd straight Debian to separate all the Docker stuff. But I don’t know if I want to add the complexity.

Idea 2 would be beefy machine for straight OMV/TrueNAS and run most stuff there, and then just move HA over to the existing i7 for more breathing room (mostly for Frigate, which could also separate to other machine I guess).

I hear a lot of great things about Proxmox, but I’m not sold that it’s worth the new complexity for me. And keeping HA (which is “critical” compared to everything else) separated feels like a smart choice. But keeping it on aging hardware diminishes that anyway, so I don’t know.

Just wanting to hear various opinions I guess.