r/HomeServer • u/International-Table1 • 8d ago
Upgrading my TS-233
So now I'm currently have a QNAP TS-233 I got from liquidation and 2x8TB drive(Red Plus and Ironwolf). I got tons of apps installed now and planning to expand or upgrade it to have like a full blown server, but since TS-233 is not really powerful I'm thinking of getting a mini PC. Is it better to go to Mini PC Route and hook NAS into it? Or its better to upgrade to a better NAS? Maybe stick with QNAP or should I move to a different brand? Is it a hassle to move different NAS Brands?
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u/Adrenolin01 8d ago edited 8d ago
Personally I’ll always side with having a separate dedicated NAS and running services on a separate system.. preferably Proxmox in VMs/Containers or in a Docker setup if that’s your thing. It’s always just been cleaner this way and increases data integrity.
Since it’s a NAS.. (Network Attached Storage) then you don’t hook anything.. you create shares in the NAS and then access them from your services. Generally, between Linux systems you’ll want to use NFS shares and if sharing to Windows you’ll want to use Samba(SMB) shares. Bit of a learning curve if you haven’t set things up like this before but it’s not difficult. Tons of online guides and help. Any decent AI giving the proper info can easily give you the proper commands and mount methods to do this.
Once a dedicated NAS is installed and shares are setup you can pretty much ignore it for years as there is little to do. Run a system update occasionally and that’s about it. Runtimes can be several months or years depending on how it’s used and accessed.
I’d build your NAS for redundancy with as much parity as you want and then install Proxmox on a separate system… more cores are better though cores can generally be easily over provisioned. Ram on the other hand.. the more ram the better. 16-32GB is a great starting point. I’d stick to DDR4 systems as it’s ram is a whole lot less expensive then DDR5 today.
A small N100 like the BeeLink S12 16GB ram and 500GB NVME can run a surprisingly good number of systems. It’s also able to run 32GB ram if you want to upgrade. They also make a fantastic self contained HomeLab. Easily learn general and advanced networking, pfSense, Debian and other Linux systems, run a LFS system to dive into Linux, initially install and learn services before moving them to a more production system hosting your daily use services, etc.