I think over in the EU you’re going to find that the stuff I buy on the low end on Amazon and eBay here in the States is likely even more money for you. That Ryzen 3900x if you can get it pretty cheap will do everything you need to do and so much more. And you’ll save money over an external bay which is the big cost hog in this whole mess.

And if it has a decent GPU you could use that for transcoding in Plex and jelly then if that’s an interest and you could also make good use of those SATA slots.

Cloud Ninjas ROCK!

I have three Dell PE r730xd’s. You want the r730xd. I have the 12x3.5" 730xd + 2x2.5", the 24x2.5" + 2x2.5", and the 12x3.5" + 4x3.5" + 2x2.5".

Buy v4 Xeons and RAM that matches their speed. You’ll be set for years. You can run one Xeon. You can run low RAM and always add. You can have 24bays and only use six drives, it’s fine. It’s a homelab. :) Remember there is a great 14c low power 65W v4 out there so you can always get that.

Here are the real 730xd models

1. r730xd 18x1.8" + 8x3.5" front (don’t waste your money)
2. r70xd 12x3.5" front (+ optional 2x2.5" rear) (+ optional 4x3.5" internal)
3. r730xd 24x2.5" front (+ optional 2x2.5" rear)
4. r730xd 16x2.5" front (I think) + 4x2.5" NVMe front (don’t waste your money)

I have the following

a. 36x3.5" HDD (24ext) on the 12bay with 2x2.5" SSD mirrored OS for XCP-ng,

b. on the r730xd 24bay I have 24x2.5" Enterprise SSD and 24x3.5" HDD (ext) and 2x2.5" SDD mirrored OS for XCP-ng,

c. on the r730xd 16x3.5" bay I have 12 HDD and of course, 2x2.5" SSD for mirrored OS for XCP-ng.

These run 24/7, are 44c/88t, 768GB DDR4ECC, run TrueNAS Scale, and a load of VMs. They have 2x10Gbps and 2x40Gbps and 3x1Gbs NICs w/Enterprise iDRAC. They have never failed. Longest uptime is 540days but it needs updating (OS) I know. :( I really believe it can run another 540days without a boot.

Oh and I’ve replaced the (one) UPS on it without a single drop in service to my home datacenter. I was literally transcoding video to the NAS while I swapped a UPS. The Dell power supplies work great. Please test yours before you put load on the system if you’re going to use both PS and trust a fail-over.

That’s my experience. I also have a Dell PE r820 (don’t waste your money) and r910 (don’t waste your back, legs, and money, and power bill!), 4xHPDL360/Gen9 (Dell are better), and 4xCisco C220 (Dell are better). The r910 is powered off and “just looks good,” but it’s useless honestly.

I’m not the guy to ask this–I really dislike unRAID. But I’m reading this forum and you asked, so…I’ve had my morning coffee, here we go.

Before I continue, I LOVE your diagram and how it was done! I wish more people in the HL/HDC click would do decent designs like this. It helps to see what you have, and can help to show where you’re going.

No. You should never downgrade. (unRAID fans, wait to flame, k?)

Proxmox is a real hypervisor, and they (the team there) keep adding useful features. (“Oh my I could have had a V8!” Wait, they do have a V8–Proxmox V8)

Proxmox supports LXC easily. I had never liked LXC then Proxmox servers forced me at ZFS-point to use them and damn they can be nice. Proxmox makes them look like a VM. Because they almost are in Linux.

Proxmox supports VMs. And it does it well. Sure you can do Debian 12 and with QEMU do the same–Proxmox is after all a layer over that, but it’s a GOOD LAYER. It gives you control in a decent GUI. And my memory is horrible these days, but each Proxmox system looks the same. You run Docker in a VM, and you can run Kubernetes (RKE, K3s, K8s, whatever they make up next).

Proxmox clusters three or more systems together and easily supports shared (okay cloned) storage. You can move VMs much easier than multiple unRAID (I’ve only used two unRAID and tried to migrate from one to other, but I cannot imagine nine unRAID servers and trying to…really anything. My bias.

Proxmox gives you FREE backup–Proxmox Backup. Your friend failed to RTFM and see there existed an easy way to recover. (I’ll point this out very graphically in a moment.)

Now, least I suffer the flames of the unRAIDians, I’ve used, supported, and TRIED to like (love? LOL no) unRAID. There are good things about it. And it DOES support ZFS now I understand. And container support? Seems very good. Let’s talk about that damn sexy store attached to it–and you can add external stores–of apps (containers, Docker in this case).

I have six mini PCs with Intel and AMD chips, three old Intel NUCs, Dell XPS 8910, Dell XPS 8930, Dell PE T320-8bay, Dell PE T320-16bay, Dell PE T630 all running Proxmox in three clusters with shared storage in the clusters and all running backup as Proxmox Backup. And the three big servers (Dell PE) running TrueNAS Scale inside of Proxmox. Not my “real” NAS, but for some other uses.

The Dell XPS 8910 died and it took me 10 seconds to know it (notification system), and I recovered all containers, VMs to the Dell PE T320-8bay in less than 30 minutes. It was a cluster member, but still.

So I’m going to say do Proxmox right, and you’ll grow faster with it.

If you really MUST use the 8300H, here is a thought:

The 8300H is 4c/8t. Not too bad.

1. Max out the RAM
2. Install a 1TB NVMe
   1. Partition as part1 256GB for Proxmox and part2 768GB for VMs
3. Install a 512GB or 1TB SSD
   1. Partition as part1 1/2 of the full as ISO storage and part2 1/2 as various data storage (Docker, LXC, yada container data)
4. Get a USB 3.2 Gen2 10Gbps external five bay 3.5" disk dock.
   1. I have four, they work okay.
   2. This would plug into Thunderbolt3 and costs much less than a true Thunderbolt3 bay. I think I paid $240USD for a Yottamaster 10Gbps 5 Bay USB C Hard Drive Enclosure Daisy Chain, Type-C External HDD Enclosure Support 2.5" & 3.5" SATA HDD/SSD up to 5X18TB - Daisy Chain DAS Support 270TB Storage Expansion [FS5C3] but it’s now $278.
   3. This is not a RAID box, but you can run RAID over the USB. It’s not going to win speed records, but then again, i5 8300H so it will do fine for backups. I have it on a six-core i7 8000 something and it’s good.
5. This gives you a hypervisor, LXC containers, VMs, one VM running Debian 12 and Dockers (dozens of them) which can be your media servers (JellyFin/Plex), yada.
6. AND you’ll run Proxmox Backup to ensure everything is backed-up on the backup server. JUST IN CASE.
7. If you set this up correctly, you could move it to the i7 you have in minimal time. Or any other new system you get. You can always pull the drives out of the external USB case and put them in a tower case of a “new” PC you find, someone gives you, you buy very cheap, yada.

Would I do this? Well you’re spending $400USD to $500USD if you don’t have parts. You’re buying HDD if you don’t have them.

You could Craig’s List or Facebook MP or even eBay and find a better, more powerful, but still power friendly system with space inside for those drives. I see things for $150 on there with SSDs and often NVMe and space inside for HDD. I mean five SATA motherboard ports is all you need for drives (RAID5 using ZFS).

I would likely go that route vs. making an old, out-of-date laptop (I have 17 of them, I know out-of-date LOL and I love my “kids.”) work. If you want to build a Frankenstein, I’m here for it. If you want a working server you’ll have (almost?) zero issues with, shop around a little and save money. And headache. (Will the laptop even boot to BIOS screen on external LCD with the main broke?) AND a desktop can easily give you multiple 1Gbps or 10Gbps connections for future use, cheap.

Cheers!

Debian 12 on the bare hardware (which I think is 2c/4t) and then setup Docker. You can also then run KVMs if you want. QEMU will be your friend.

​

If you had a newer, faster NUC, or similar, Proxmox as the hypervisor and then Debian 12 as VM with Docker on it. You get LXC with Proxmox “for free,” ( LOL ) so that kinda rocks. Two cores is not really a decent speed point. And it needs 8GB of RAM to be useful in that case. I **think** NUC 7 doesn’t normally have that, but I don’t NUC much–I used minipc non-NUC “clones.” For lack of a better word.