You can pick any hard drive, preferably a NAS/Server Oriented one.
They do have to match if you’re doing a multi drive RAID/ZFS though.
It’s kind of complicated, if you can afford the lifetime price, HexOS has some amazing things going for it as a fork of TrueNAS, but TrueNAS is FOSS and has probably everything you need, if you’re planning on doing Jellyfin, you might wanna stick with TrueNAS Scale.
I presume you acknowledge the risk imposed going through the Custom NAS Route yes?
No?
I already have a QNAP NAS, but intend to switch.
I see, at least you must be familiar with things like best practices 101 (security, maintenance, 3-2-1 rule etc.) yes? If so that’s good enough.
Yes, although the setup was really what took the most time (especially the VPN setup), but I always go through all the settings of each device/app I own.
Maintenance only takes me 5 minutes per week as it’s mostly automated. I presume similar options are available on TRUENAS.
What is the best hardware to use for at home self hosting now?
Which pcs are good for such stuff?
Can you recommend Raspberry Pi 5?
I don’t really do any hardcore self-hosting, but I have an absolute dinosaur of a 13 year old machine that’s currently running things like Joplin, Jellyfin, Fresh RSS, Immich and it all works flawlessly.
I think when I was looking into hardware that would be optimal for a NAS build, there was a key difference in the hard drive types one must select for what is, naturally, a write-heavy environment and application. I found that it’s generally not recommended to use SMR drives, as their overlapping data tracks create a huge performance penalty for write-heavy operations. Not only that, but when used in a RAID array, can also, generally speaking, increase the risk for drive failure when doing heavy array integration[1]. I’m not a storage media expert, but these are the most common points I’ve found across various articles.
I appreciate your reply!
I’m still looking for the best hardware solution in 2026.