Hello! I’m upgrading my home server and am looking for some advice on how to use all of my available hardware.
My server runs off of an old 6600k with DDR4 RAM. I have a new motherboard and a 14600k on order with plans to reuse the RAM since the speed and amount (32GB) is sufficient for now.
This server started as a Plex server with an Arr stack. I’ve added some small YouTube utilities (MeTube and Pinchflat) as well as Home Assistant. This is all running in OMV with mergerfs and SnapRAID for storage.
Here are a two plans that I need help deciding between. I’m worried about cramping my expansion possibilities or making things convoluted for no gains:
-
All-in-one Server: Everything moves over to the new 14600k server, including Plex, my NAS, and other self-hosted utilities. I’ve got a NAS case that will support 10 3.5" drives as well as a SATA controller card to expand my available 6 Gbps ports to 12.
-
Media Server and NAS Server: The 14600k machine runs Plex and all other self-hosted tools. The 6600k runs OMV to manage NAS storage on a separate machine.
Long story short: I have all of the required hardware to make two machines. Does that make things easier for me in the long run, or am I just over complicating things?
All in one’s advantage is fewer points of failure, lower power consumption, and ease of troubleshooting. Disadvantage, something breaks, everything’s down.
Duo setup: more power, more points of failure, typically they’ll end up intertwined and dependant on each other, so if one goes down they’re both likely down. You usually need more hardware for High Availability.
I’d go either all in one with the best hardware, or go with what the other commentor said and have one be prod and the other dev.
I would probably split into the new one being your prod machine that runs everything important and use the old one for experimenting and labbing.
Thank you for the advice! I hadn’t thought about this in a prod vs. dev scenario, so this is really appreciated. I will keep things simple on one device.