Hello there, I’m in this rabbit hole of self hosting, but it’s just for me and my wife, mostly for me though.

I’ve put together on a broken laptop of 10yo, Ubuntu server 500gb (motherboard) + 2TB storage (DVD tray), CasaOS, Nextcloud, Immich and Plex.

I have a total of 300gb of photos and videos (including immich dB) , 50Gb of docs (including nextcloud dB), and everything else is disposable, like some movies.

I do not plan to have extra services, maybe a password manager.

In this black Friday I’ll buy a mini pc i5 and another 2TB drive to store zipped/encrypted backup files. And will most likely try proxmox there.

Now to the point, I’m seeing a lot people doing NAS separately, and some even putting things like Plex on the NAS server and not on the “main server”. And the question is, don’t I already have a NAS? My Ubuntu is sharing 2TB through the network, I’m configuring backups (with duplicati). What would I really gain if I buy a cheap synology NAS only for a shared folder? The mini pc I’ll buy with i5 16gb won’t do a better job than a cheap 1ghz 2mb memory NAS?

I hope I make sense, thanks in advance.