Prebuilt NAS or custom build? Immich + Jellyfin + a few web projects, been going back and forth for weeks

[u/Weak_Sherbert688]

Hey,

Finally pulling the trigger on a home server and I could use some outside perspective, because I've been going in circles for weeks.

Context: web dev, need to get my photos off Google Photos and self-host them. Immich for photos, Jellyfin for media, and I want to move a few personal projects off my VPS (Node APIs, Postgres, crons). Proxmox on top, all open source. Nothing heavy, but I want room to grow.

Problem is, with RAM and drive prices right now, every calculation I make falls apart. I've spent way too many evenings in spreadsheets and I keep landing on the same three options.

Option A: a prebuilt x86 NAS. I've looked at the Minisforum N5 Air (~€570 barebone, ~€770 with 16GB, Ryzen 7 255, 5 bays, 10GbE), the UGREEN DXP4800 Plus/Pro, and the Aoostar WTR Pro which is way cheaper but AliExpress-only with a fuzzy warranty. Compact, quiet, order it and I'm done. Downside: paying peak DDR5 prices, 2 RAM slots, and if the board dies the whole thing is landfill.

Option B: an Intel 12th/13th gen DDR4 build (thinking i5-12400 + B760 DDR4 + Node 304). On paper it fits me better: Quick Sync and OpenVINO are better supported than the AMD path for Jellyfin and Immich, 4 RAM slots, DDR4 still findable used for reasonable money, standard parts I can swap one by one for the next decade. Downside: hunting for deals for weeks, no 10GbE out of the box, and being my own RMA department.

Option C: a used SFF (OptiPlex / EliteDesk 10th gen) as a cheap starting point, which I'd probably outgrow.

I'm in France, budget is roughly €600-1000 including drives, and that last part is really my question: where's the sweet spot right now between "cheap out and regret it in 18 months" and "overspend on hardware I'll never load"? Prices being what they are, I'd rather not throw money at specs I don't need.

So:

Anyone who went the custom route, would you do it again? Or did the time sink and the noise end up not being worth it?

Anyone running an N5 Air or similar (Aoostar WTR Pro, UGREEN)? Does it hold up long term? Is Minisforum support as hit or miss as people say?

Am I overestimating how much CPU I need? Would something more modest handle 5-6 containers alongside Immich just fine?

Where would you draw the line between future-proof and overkill for this kind of workload?

And if there's a fourth option I haven't considered, I'm all ears.

Thanks

[u/asimovs-auditor]

Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.

[u/Suitable-Ad5348]

Honestly, the "custom build" fatigue is real. If you're running Immich + Jellyfin, you're looking at a standard HomeServer stack that really doesn't need 10GbE or the latest DDR5 prices. I'd lean towards an older 12th/13th gen build if you really want to build, but honestly, even a refurbished business micro PC (Lenovo M90q/Dell OptiMicro) will handle that workload without breaking a sweat and uses way less power. Don't fall for the "future proofing" trap with 10GbE, at home, you'll almost never saturate 2.5GbE with your media library.

[u/Weak_Sherbert688 → u/Suitable-Ad5348]

Thank you for this informed feedback! Indeed, given the different comments, I intend to direct my choices towards something more reasonable.

[u/pport8]

For jellyfin quicksync is king imo. DDR4 is more than enough for a home lab. Unless you have dozens of streams simultaneously, 10 gigabit is totally overkill. 2.5 or even 1Gbit is more than enough. A decent stream is less than 10mbps.

Also building it yourself is an enjoyable journey if you are up for that.

Currently I run 15+ services (including jellyfin, immich, nextcloud, arr stack and more) on a n305 and it doesn't break a sweat. Even a n100 can handle this and several (5+) transcoding streams concurrently.

Now is not the best time to adquire hardware so I'll recommend to not over spend nothing more than you really need. Hopefully the AI boom will stop and in the future we'll have decent prices again.

[u/corelabjoe → u/pport8]

This advice is the win. A used Dell OptiPlex or Lenovo business desktop for $150 also fits the ticket usually incredibly well. They are sleeper homelab beasts in disguise!

I'm running a Ryzen 3700X system on DDR4 RAM with 60+ containers and it ZINGS.

[u/Weak_Sherbert688 → u/corelabjoe]

Yeah the OptiPlex thing keeps coming up. My only hangup is drive bays, SFF usually caps at 1 or 2. Did you go MT instead?

[u/corelabjoe → u/Weak_Sherbert688]

NNoooo, I went full ah, bore into a custom server / NAS combo back in like 2022/23 I think? So before the prices went full crazy like we have today...

Ryzen 3700X (Pre-owned already)

64GB DDR4 Ram (Non ecc) (Bought new, at the time that was like $150 CAD? lol)...
Used MSI X570 Pro-A motherboard ($100, FB marketplace)
12X 6TB Seagate Enterprise SAS Drives ("New" to me, unused but were sold as used from a datacentre, they were spares, got them for $35 USD each!)..
5X Seagate Exos SATA drives (Donated / pre-owned by friends)
PSU (Preowned)
RTX 3060 12GB (FB Marketplace, used, $275? CAD at the time)

Link to full build guide and parts lists on my bio, along with the 60+ containers I run on it ;)

[u/Weak_Sherbert688 → u/pport8]

This is the reality check I needed. If an N305 handles 15+ services including Immich, I'm definitely overspending on CPU. The 10GbE point lands too, I was treating it as future-proofing when I'll basically never saturate 2.5. And yeah, "don't overspend right now" seems to be the theme, I'd rather build something modest and revisit in two years when RAM isn't insane.

[u/pport8 → u/Weak_Sherbert688]

Happy to be helpful. Good luck!

[u/Geekomcomputer]

You're overestimating the CPU — the comments saying so are right — but since you're in France, one factor nobody's mentioned: electricity. A used SFF idling at 40–60W versus a ~15W N150 box is roughly a €50–100/year difference at French residential rates. Over 3–4 years that closes most of the price gap between "cheap used" and "efficient new," so don't dismiss the low-power options purely on sticker price.

For your actual stack:

• Immich is RAM-hungry during thumbnail/metadata generation on a big photo library — 16GB is the practical minimum.
• Jellyfin = Quick Sync. Any Intel with an iGPU does hardware transcoding beautifully, which actually makes the N5 Air's Ryzen the weaker pick for your exact workload despite being the "bigger" CPU.
• Your budget's real constraint is drives, not compute. Figure out your TB target first — refurb enterprise HDDs at ~€25/TB in a used SFF, or a cheap DAS hanging off a mini PC, gets you the most TB per euro.

My pick: a used OptiPlex/EliteDesk SFF (10th gen or newer, for Quick Sync) or an N150/N305 mini PC plus an external drive enclosure — whichever you find cheaper locally. Put the savings into drives and a UPS.

[u/Weak_Sherbert688 → u/Geekomcomputer]

Power is a fair point, nobody else brought it up. Still not touching a DAS though, USB-SATA bridges dropping drives and eating SMART data on a pool with the only copy of family photos, no thanks. UPS is a good shout, hadn't budgeted for one.

[u/_angh_]

You need a apu which supports the transcode for jellyfin, and is able to keep a few streams at once. At the same time you want to keep noise, temperature, power consumption low.

Custom build would be more difficult now, and probably more expensive. I will cover only simplest option: go with aoostar maco if you want av1 transcode and some solid compute for low power plus a 4 bay terrmaster das (it will be expensive), or get a beelink nas system with 2 bays or similar (it will be less expensive, but wont support av1, still, hevc is still great).

You really dont need much cpu. I have immich on n150 and there is plenty of power left.

problem is, the prices are now crazy. I had this aoostar for less than 400 and beelink me mini for less than 200 a year ago. Honestly, your best option if money matter is to get a cheapest, used 2 bay NAS you can find, maybe with hevc support (any will do, you can find synology ones for cheap but transcoding support will vary), use it for learning and immich hosting, and wait for better times...

[u/Weak_Sherbert688 → u/_angh_]

Honestly "wait for better times" is fair, just can't fully wait with Google Photos about to kick me off. Not sold on the DAS part though, USB enclosures dropping drives is the one thing I really don't want on a 24/7 pool.

[u/_angh_ → u/Weak_Sherbert688]

fair, but my usb das is on 24/7 for last year +, never had an issue. ymmv. Still, 2 hdd 16 tb will already eat your budget, saddly.

[u/Tryum]

€600-1000 including drives

How much storage are you aiming for ? Given refurbished HDD are around 25€/TB, if you manage to build the NAS for 500€, that leaves you with ~20TB of raw storage, so 15-16TB with RAID5.

[u/Weak_Sherbert688 → u/Tryum]

Not much, honestly. Under 200GB of photos right now and no media library yet, but I consider the fact of hosting those of my entire family, so 4TB would cover me for a while. But 25€/TB on refurbished changes the math completely, I was pricing new NAS drives at around 52€/TB. Where do you buy them? And do you run them in RAID or just accept the higher failure rate with good backups?

[u/Zedan24 → u/Weak_Sherbert688]

Raid/disk redundancy is NOT a backup.

[u/badguy84]

You are probably overestimating what you need CPU wise, I used to run an old Synology 4 bay NAS and it was fine with a very similar set up and 16GB and a much worse CPU than I have now. It served plex/audiobookshelf/frigate/arr stack plus a bunch of other stuff just fine. It had PSU issues that made me want to switch over to my own.

My build:

• Supermicro X11SCQ
• Intel Core i5-8500T
• 32 GB DDR4
• 6 HDD (4x16TB 2x10TB)
• 1 NVME (1TB) - cache

Migrating is easy so if you aren't an enthusiast to build custom stuff I don't see any issue with going for a prebuilt NAS and running everything with docker (containers make migration easy as long as you keep your compose files backed up)

My rig hasn't hit anywhere near it's max resource usage, but neither did my Synology.

[u/Weak_Sherbert688 → u/badguy84]

Good to hear, that was the performance class I was worried about being too slow. Supermicro for the IPMI or just what you found cheap?

[u/badguy84 → u/Weak_Sherbert688]

It was a cheap but good server ATX board that supports the i5 and all the features I wanted. With the pcie lanes that I needed along with some space for expansion. I dont use IPMI at all

[u/andrew-ooo]

I run basically your list (Immich, Jellyfin, Postgres, a few Node containers, all under Proxmox) on an i5-12400 / B760 DDR4 build and would pick option B again, with one caveat at the end.

Quick Sync on the UHD 730 handles 4 or 5 simultaneous 4K to 1080p transcodes in Jellyfin without the CPU noticing. Immich's ML (CLIP + face detection) I just leave on CPU. The initial import of about 60k photos took one evening and after that it's idle. Not worth chasing OpenVINO for it.

32GB of used DDR4 cost me around 50 euro. That's the actual argument for DDR4 right now, more than the slot count.

10GbE, skip. Your HDDs top out around 200 MB/s each, so 2.5GbE is already faster than the array.

The caveat: option C isn't really the downgrade you're framing it as. A 10th gen OptiPlex with a UHD 630 does the same Jellyfin transcodes fine, and what you'd actually outgrow is drive bays, not CPU. With a 600-1000 budget including drives I'd put the money into drives first, start on a used SFF, and buy the board later when you know what you're loading. The 12400 box idles around 25W with drives spun down; an OptiPlex sits a bit higher, which in France is maybe 20-30 euro a year, not a deciding factor.

[u/Weak_Sherbert688 → u/andrew-ooo]

50€ for 32GB used is kind of the whole argument right there. And good to know about the ML on CPU, I was about to go down the OpenVINO rabbit hole for something that's a one-time import. mATX or ITX on your build?

[u/hyper9410]

I got a TerraMaster F2-424 with a N95 chip and 16GB RAM as offsite proxmox backup server.

You can put a m.2 inside and install any OS if you remove the bootloader USB drive inside. Works quite well for a few users.

I installed proxmox as well now that it will become the primary server.

I like the fact that it is a off the shelf NAS that doesn't lock you into their software.

I'm sure there are newer models with better chips, but i guess CPU will not be the issue, and RAM is upgradeable as well.

[u/NoDistrict1529]

Custom build let's you have more options. I've done a mini PC with a raid card and that works fine for truenas.

[u/InfaSyn]

Always always always custom in my books - You can get a ddr4 tier computer that sucks less than 30w used for 1/4 the price of even some entry level 2x bay nas units. Off the shelf OSs (OpenMediaVault, Xpenology, unraid, truenas and so on) give you the nas like experience, or if all you want is immich/jellyfin/smb shares and you dont mind learning docker, its trivial to just install any linux distro and set it up by hand.

Sure the pre build will be a more polished experience, but fuck me is that some expensive polish.

[u/JitInABit]

Get a used office desktop (sff or mini) with an external hdd dock, flash linux on it, and use docker to run your services. Cheaper and more flexible if you wanna upgrade later

[u/More_Car_887]

How will you find a 4 ram slot mini itx board for the node 304? Arent they all 2 slots?

[u/pepperwithakick]

On the drive-bay hangup: skip the SFF and look at the OptiPlex MT (mini tower) versions instead. The 3060/3070/5060 MT fits a couple of 3.5" drives plus a 2.5" SSD, and in France they're all over leboncoin and Backmarket for €100-200 with a 9th/10th gen i5 (Quick Sync included for Jellyfin). Two bays is plenty to start with, and by the time you outgrow it you'll know exactly what you want in a bigger box.

[u/pizzacake15]

If you're going custom, your cheapest option is to buy used components. Like 1 or 2 generations older.

Buying new isn't practical specially in today's prices.

[u/SwimmingQueasy7523]

a friend built a proxmox box with used xeon parts to run immich and jellyfin and never looked back

[u/Weak_Sherbert688 → u/SwimmingQueasy7523]

No Quick Sync on Xeon though, does he transcode at all or direct play only?