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?
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.