My homeserver is new again...

As written last month in My homeserver is dying in slow motion it just crashed again a day after. Of course while I was in Paris for the EWC so no chance to fix it.

In an impulse I decided against another DIY build PC as homeserver and settled with the Aoostar WTR Pro which is a really compact 4-Bay NAS.

Aoostar WTR Pro - a NAS?

Yes and no. It is basically marketed as a NAS but not like QNAP or Synology, it does not come with a own OS at all. It is basically a mini embeded PC with a AMD 5825U (8 Corese up to 4.5GHz) which consume near half of the wattage my old Intel i3 did (35W vs 60W) and have more than double performace and the whole case with 4 bay 3.5" is about 1/4 of the size of my old case.

My old now retired homeserver, will change the broken NVMe SSD, install Kubuntu and try to sell it. Still fine as small desk PC for office work.

And now the new replacement, sits on my desk behind my right Screen. I like that the connectors are on the side, would be way moore awesome if they were on the right but hey :)

Beside the 4 Trays it also have 2 M2-SSD Slots in the bottom,, which I happily use with some laying around old M2 SSDs. A 128 GB Samsung something for the OS and a 512 GB WD for some always on running stuff which isn’t really important. (flight radar SDR for example)

In the bays I use 3x Spinning HDD together with an 1TB Intel Datacenter SATA SSD as Cache together with ZFS in a Raid. The only Thing I lack to make it perfect is RAM, currently only 16GB, for ZFS and Proxmox this is the bare minimum. But at current RAM Prices I did not dare to even look for 64GB. Maybe some day :)

Software?

I decided against a bare metal linux install as I did in the last years. Mostly due to upgrade lazyness and non rolling distro they got quite old and unpatched. So I went the Proxmox Route. Recent Proxmox as runner and then tried to do LXC where I can for all my containers to keep used ressources low.

So lets see how well it will run the next years.