When we came down in November we brought with us a 14TB drive filled with copies of our Movie and TV Show libraries to have a local copy for convenience. That drive was full and would not allow additional content so I started thinking how I could add a NAS cheaply. I ordered a Raspberry PI and installed OpenMediaVault on it with three 8 TB drives (one for parity). It seemed easy enough but I quickly found out It was not working the way I needed it to and I could not figure out how to fix it.
All of my drives are USB3 drives and I didn’t want to shuck them and put them in a case. I do have experience with UnRaid and I found a cute little Beelink AMD Ryzen mini pc with and NVME, RAM and Win10Pro license on sale on Amazon for just over $300. I couldn’t build a similar computer for even close to that. It was a no-brainer purchase. After spending days waiting for the parity to build and adding a a 4th 8TB drive. I’m finally copying the Plex content onto it.
While all of this was happening, I installed Pihole in a VM on my computer, which meant my main desktop now had to be on all the time. I will be migrating that to a docker on the unraid box, which is another factor in the decision to splurge for the Ryzen box.
I also decided to install HomeAssistant in a VM on my computer. That turned out to be super easy and it turned out I could then easily automate the turning on AND off of the rear speakers for the TV/home theater in sync with the TV. I’ll be migrating that to a docker on the unraid box too, another factor in the decision to buy it.
Next I decided to add a wifi security camera for peace of mind. I installed iSpy on my computer and configured it to record HD videos anytime there’s motion and it integrates with HomeAsistant to give me a constant SD stream that I can access with my phone. It too will be migrated to the docker which will finally let me allow my power-hungry desktop to sleep again.