Up till now I’ve been running Debian on a 2008 Dell tower as my homeserver. I just got 2 1tb drives for it so I want to upgrade to an actual dedicated NAS software to simplify how I manage it. The problem is, I only have 4gb of RAM in it. Any recommendations?

Edit: For context, I mostly use the server for Nextcloud and Syncthing but I also want to be able to have a generic Debian server with ssh access available if I need it.

  • First of all, 4 GB is not so bad, I ran with 4 GB on mine for years. In fact I’m still not using more than 4 GB even though I have more RAM now, it still takes 3.7 GB right now and I run 20 containers.

    I don’t run Nextcloud though, and I don’t run VM’s. VM’s definitely would need more RAM, and I don’t know how much Nextcloud wants. Syncthing wants very little.

    Think about why do you want a GUI, they don’t typically offer that much if you already know your way around Linux. And once you set up a container it will keep working indefinitely (until you upgrade it anyway, but that’s another kettle of fish).

    You also don’t need anything fancy to put together a RAID1 out of those two disks, if that’s what you mean to do.