Homelab

Hello,

i have been a member of this sub for many years but never posted anything here since im not that deep into networking but i love to admire your cool builds.

But i have a question for the professionals regarding my situation. When i lived with my parents i had my own unraid server build from my old pc. And back then i loved it and me and my buddys all gamed on this server for hours. But fast forward 5 years and i moved out and living alone by myself and my server is standing there just collecting dust.

Since we dont really game anymore and i found it kinda unefficent to run a server for me alone while i did everything from my desktop pc at home i haven't used my server since. But since covid is gone i travel a lot more and would like to use a server for all my files again since i need to access them from my laptop/phone as well.

But my requirements changed a lot. I pretty much just need a cloud to store my files and photos that i can access from anywhere via phone or laptop. I got this setup back then with nextcloud. I need 2TB of storage for all my files and photos. It shouldn't cost that much monthly and needs to be stable.

I just feel like my server is way to overkill for what i want to do. Unraid is just a beast to tame. Dont get me wrong im into coding and im always up for a challenge but i don't have that much experience in networking. Im sure i could setup my server again within a weekend again though. I mean the beauty with an unraid server would be to have all the possibilitys but i don't really use them.

If it would just be the work i would be fine with that, since i love tinkering around i always want to learn something new, but i want to also address the cost and energy consumption of a own server regarding the environment. This are the specs of the Server:

Intel® Core™ i5-4440 CPU @ 3.10GHz

GeForce GTX 650

16GIB DDR3 Ram

240 GB SSD as Cache

WD red 2 TB HDD

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I live in Germany so my energy prices are really high compared to other country's i pay 0.3073 euros per kWh. Chat GPT calculated a monthly uptime cost of 35 euros which is a lot compared to 2TB google cloud storage for 10€ a month. But is this even accurate?

Also beside the HDD there are no server components built in its just my old pc with a standard Power Supply and i don't have a UPS just a standard Desktop PC powersupply and no second drive to run any form of RAID or backup.

Another Idea would be to downgrade to a raspberry pi nas like a buddy of mine uses i even have a powerful pi lying around here.

So what would be the play here im fine with investing a little bit of money into a second HDD or a UPS but keep in mind i have used this PC as a Desktop PC for 6+ years so the hardware, beside the HDD, isn't new. Would taking out the GPU or reducing the Ram lower power consumption by much. Or should i pop the HDD out and just build a PI NAS or is GDrive the most logical option here?

Thanks for reading i appreciate any tips and opinions!

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