How it started:
I bought a MiniPC (Blackview MP-80) to run Home Assistant and some lights etc. to go with it.
It's now exactly one year later this is what my setup looks like now:
BMAX B2 Pro --> Home Assistant OS
Blackview MP-80 --> Proxmox --> Nextcloud-AIO & Immich
ODROID H4+ --> Proxmox --> TrueNAS
How it's going:
With the heatwave in Europe I've now installed cooling to keep my HDD's from heating up.
I know it's Janky as hell, but I love it. The plan going forward is to buy a 3D Printer so that I can 3D Print a custom 10" rack, and I'll build my own cooling and temperature monitoring system with ESP32 and create a dashboard for it in Home Assistant and sorting out networking.
It's a work in progress, having a lot of fun learning and adding new things.
A lesson I learnt along the way:
HDD's on your desk are loud AF when you're constantly writing to a database
Solution: Everything except backups and Media run on SSD's
Depends on the drive too, I have some insanely loud Ironwolf drives and you would never guess they're from the same manufacturer as my practically silent Exos X18s.
The other HDD I have is a WD Gold, it's definitely the louder of the two, both of them are ~5 years old. Now that I moved the databases off of them, they are quieter than my work laptop, so they don't bug me.
But oh boy, it really did sound like a train yard at one point.
Some drives are worse than others and higher capacities get worse and worse, in my experience, Seagate drives are extremely loud.
If you get helium drives (like wd red plus > 8TB i think),or 2nd hand hgst/ WD enterprise drives) they are significantly quieter.
But, having an ssd is cheaper probably. I have an SSD for the boot drive and all databases, configuration folders, etc... In docker so general IO is fast, then media, documents, pictures, etc... On the big HDDs.