I dived into the selfhosting rabbit hole once again and again I am stuck at the hardware part. I’d like to start small-ish to make it realisable. I thought about a NAS (Openmediavault probably). First I wanted to do it on a Raspberry Pi with an external hard-drive but then I read USB connected drives are unreliable and so on. Mini PCs are too small to house internal drives so should I go with a (refurbished) business PC from ebay and add some drives to it?But they usually come with Windows 10, which I wouldn’t need but makes them more expensive. I also have at least one old PC case laying around but no mainboard or CPU for it, if that info might be important. Thank you in advance for helping a noob out!
Edit: What I want to achieve: I would like a NAS and (separated) a server with some small services (pi-hole or adguard, syncthing, jellyfin (getting the data from the NAS), and so on). I thought about running the small services with docker on a RPi 4 and the NAS on a refurbished business PC with SATA drives in the case (I checked ebay and there are mainboards with 4 SATA III connectors and PCI so I could even add more SATA connectors). In a second moment a backup server (maybe with borg) would be a good idea but I could also do manual backups with an external USB HDD for the time being.
It is 100% ok to break your homeland into 2 parts.
Get a dedicated nas and secondhand eBay PC. The windows licence doesn’t matter, no one is going to discount the price because you are not going to use the licence.
With dedicated NAS you mean a synology or something like that? Because they are not very affordable. Yeah I figured that so I didn’t even ask for a discount.
You can also build your own thing with something like a Jonbo N case.
What about some drives in a small form factor business PC (not the new mini PCs)? Too bad airflow to cool it?