So I made a decision to update what I’m using for a Home Server setup. For background, I’m an I.T. Director at a University as well as an adjunct professor. Given these and other roles that take my time, I wanted a setup that is as low-maintenance as possible. I’ve owned several NAS devices (QNAP, Synology [still use a DS423+ at work], and several other devices). I frequently come across older hardware that I like to repurpose, and lately it’s mostly laptops. I had been running a Proxmox setup on an HP Z230 Workstation with an Xeon E3-1241 and 24GB of RAM. I came across ZimaOS (I had been testing CasaOS) and was intrigued by configuring a laptop-based setup running ZimaOS and the necessary apps I need.

Here is what I came up with:

Server:

Dell XPS 15 9500 (battery stops charging at 70% and throttling is reduced)

i7-10750H

16GB RAM ( I may upgrade to 32GB if performance is low)

256NVMe (Zima OS Host drive)

Nvidia 1650ti GPU

Storage:

1TB NVMe (App/Container storage)

256GB NVMe (cache-temp-staging)

3 - 4TB HDD (ZFS pool RaidZ) (media, documents, etc.)

16TB Buffalo NAS (Raid1 - 8TB useable)

Cenmate 6 bay DAS (3 NVMe/3 SATA)

Applications:

Plex and/or JellyFin, along with the Arr’s

HAOS

PiHole

Vaultwarden

Immich

Paperless NGX

Synching

With ZimaOS, I’ve discovered that you can do a lot using the cli for functions not available in the GUI. This has allowed me to import my ZFS pool that was created in Proxmox and create a mountpint and symlink so that I can use this pool with any app that I install. I’m going to see how this setup performs over time, but so far it seems to work good. The Dell XPS has a a 6 core 12 thread CPU so it can handle all of the tasks I require. Interested in hearing from anyone using a laptop and/or DAS device running ZimaOS on your experiences/advice. Thanks