Hello all!
I am currently planning out my first homelab and I have been having an immense amount of trouble finding the right configuration for my first home server. I have been bouncing back and forth between platforms and I just feel nervous about making the wrong choices.
My needs really aren’t so crazy, the main purpose of this server will be NAS, and so I will likely put a good bit of the budget into storage. Though, I would also love to run some docker containers here and there for things like Jellyfin, Pi-hole, and Home Assistant. I also would be running some other random Linux VMs, but nothing too critical.
The only three things I really care about otherwise are decent hardware transcoding, power efficiency, and support for ECC memory.
I am considering picking up an older Kaby Lake i3 7100 or maybe a newer i3 10100 and going from there, as the base system would be rather inexpensive this way. But part of me also wonders if I should step up to something with 6 cores. Or maybe there is another option all together that is better?
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Used prices:
Dell T320 - $150
500gb to 1tb enterprise ssd - $50
4x 10tb sas drives - $100 each
Makes a very capable little server for pretty cheap. If you don’t get the ideal cpu or ram amount neither of those cost much. Can even make it really quiet with a Noctua fan. A second SSD for OS and VMs to mirror the first would be better. An icydock 4x 2.5in drive cage to 5.25 bay is really nice. For the t320 im assuming 8x 3.5in hot swap bays and like a H310 HBA. Anyways you can reasonably get started for $600 including storage. Can share more ab9ut configuration if you want to go this route. This is basic my secondary server behind my T440.
You should be able to find a used consumer tower with something better than an i3 10100 in your budget if you let go of ECC.
Don’t worry too much about making wrong choices. You will eventually find yourself wanting to build a whole system from scratch no matter what choices you make now.
Do you already have experience with docker and some of the software you want to run? If not, I’d recommend starting there on whatever the cheapest system you can find. Unraid and TrueNAS make a lot of choices for you and can provide a gentler learning curve than proxmox or other hypervisors.
You don’t need ECC memory for any of this.
ECC memory is rarely beneficial to the home server.
But I digress, moving on. Forget the old hardware recommendations. Especially anything Ivy/Sandy/Haswell/Broadwell. If it’s not Skylake or newer, don’t bother.
That said, I wouldn’t bother at all. No sense in roping yourself in to a dead end platform with poor performance and high power consumption, while simultaneously limiting your expansion possibilities.
- i3 12100
- 2x8gb DDR4 3600
- Middle of the road H670 or Z690 board
- Fractal R5
- Thermaltake GX2 PSU
$500.
All brand new parts, all very expandable. Plenty of performance too. Compared to the 7100 you were considering it has over 3 times more compute power, while having an obscenely good iGPU for transcoding, should you need it.
And it gives you an upgrade path. Need more compute or more than (8) 4K transcodes? Slap a 13500 in it and go to town. More drives? The R5 gives you 10 drive bays. Etc etc etc.
You couldn’t pay me to go down the used hardware route at this point, not when you can build an entire brand new machine that will significantly outperform them while using less power for $500.
just my 2 cents!
honestly depending on your budget and performance requirements, any pc made in the last 5 years + a SAS controller (for use with DIRT cheap datacenter SAS drives) should work. if you need it for more of a SAN setup and not just a media/backup server, grab a couple 10/25/40 gig NICs as well. ECC is limiting and probably overkill, and technology grows so fast that a $40 ryzen 3500X arguably going to be more performant (and MANY times quieter/more efficient) than any cheap xeon setup people suggest. it also blows that pants off an i3-7100, and allows you to use 3-4 full generations of motherboards, which means room for another cheap upgrade path in the future.
$30 - craigslist a PSU
$30 - craigslist some DDR4
$40 - x370/470/570 motherboard
$40 - just about any ryzen that isn’t first gen. as mentioned you can occasionally grab 3500X for as low as $40-$50. at 6C/6T it’s not the best choice for virtualization, so budget in another $20-30 for something with a lil more oomph if that’s a requirement.
$30 - SAS HBA like an LSI 92xx/93xx
$50 - if you dont mind fiddling with old crap and need speed, 2x connectx-3 56gbe NICs and a DAC or AOC. closer to $100 if you want something simpler/more supported like some 10gbe cards that use cat6.
$120 - 10x 4TB SAS drives from ebay
$50 - craigslist/amazon a case
$75 - for all the cables and bits i’m definitely forgetting
that’s ~$550 for 20-30TB+ of protected and fairly fast storage, with a path for some cheap incremental upgrades.
It may be worth getting a dedicated NAS and also getting a mini pc.
It may also be worth going the 12th gen route. Amazon has great deal used if you look. Sometimes a z690 board has enough features to get a used one over a new low end board. Like pcie bifurcation, more PCIE lanes, maybe more sata ports, 2.5G etc…
Go simple, low power and scale up if needed (it won’t be needed) I started with a 12400, and I barely touch more than a single core
Check Out serverbuilds.net
All depends on how much storage you need. You may be able get away with mini pc and an external usb drive.
I have an old dell optiplex that I shoved into a rosewill case with an HBA card and a stack of drives. That is currently running unraid and a handful of dockers.
It’s been running for a while now, waiting for me to replace my home desktop and recycle those parts into a “new” file server
IMO: A cheap way to get started would be an HP Z4 Gen4 from ebay. They’ll use the larger LGA Xeon chips from Skylake-x/Kaby Lake. Support more RAM and Cores than the traditional i3/i5/i7 boards. No KVM/iLO features, but reliable hardware for a modest price.