What specs are best for my NAS?

🚧 Installation
1

I am in the process of buying a Intel NUC in order to run my first server and I need some assistance.

This will be a personal cloud that basically only I will use as a replacement for iCloud/Dropbox/etc that I am currently storing my files on.

I am a photographer, videographer, and work in media so I have a ton of large files all the way from 42 megapixel RAW images to several gigabyte 4K/6K video files. I would also like to be able to utilize the talk feature down the road for family/friends/coworkers. I can also see myself sharing files from my drive to colleagues and family/friends. I also plan on put my music library on here as well, if there’s a good way to stream music through the app.

Right now I am torn between the Intel NUC 10 i3 or i5 or perhaps the NUC 8 i5. I’m really at a loss because I have no idea what kind of specs I need.

I am going to spend over $1,000 on this so I want to buy something that will last at least a few years.

Right now I have picked the SSD which will be the 4TB IronWolf from Seagate. I’m thinking 16gb of RAM should be enough.

Really it’s down to the CPU at this point and any help would be much appreciated.

I have gigabit internet at home so that is the internet speed I will be working with. It also will have full disk encryption.

It has to be a NUC since I am having HomeDrive build this with their OS on it and that’s the only hardware they currently have it ported to.

Thanks! Any help is very much appreciated!

2

I am not sure if you have that much benefits putting everything on SSDs. Classic disks are cheaper, perhaps more reliable, and instead you can take two and spin up a RAID, so in case of a single disk failure your systems remains running. For the speed, the transfer is limited by the network speed. Different thing though for the system disk.

I think this could be a critical point for your CPU. Do you use with very few users, or more and with a TURN/STUN server? Unfortunately, I don’t have any numbers here…

For the rest, the thumbnail generation might consume some resources. But if you don’t need them on the spot and it is ok to generate them through cronjobs, it’s not critical either.

If you are unsure and don’t know at all, it’s not bad to start small first. You have an “old” computer, in some cases a Raspberry Pi 4 is good as well, see where your limits are. It often depends on the use case, many people/computer accessing the system at the same time is very challenging. But if that doesn’t happen, or mainly reading files, you won’t need as many resources. And you get to know the Nextcloud system/world a bit better before you start putting money into hardware.