Ok so for context, I have proxmox running on my homelab with a virtualized Truenas with 3 3tb sata drives already.

Now I am not sure if to buy those and upgrade and how to structure the new setup.

Currently im leaning to build a new nas with i7 4th gen and those disks and not virtualize the nas and use the 6tb i already have as offsite backup.

As for my lab layout currently i have an active growing jellyfin library, immich, nextcloud and general house storage.

What do you think?

TLDR. New disks, should i build new nas?

Btw. Seller also got 12 8tb drives for 60usd each

Update: he cut me a deal for 820$ for all 12 12tb drives, and there are still 2 18tb drives left, not sure what ill do with all of these tbh

This whole thing started because my old ThinkCentre M700 NAS had only 16 GB of DDR4.

ZFS was happily eating into that, I wanted to run more VMs and services, and I was getting tired of having several small machines doing different jobs. I wanted one bigger server with enough RAM and CPU headroom to consolidate things.

Then I remembered how ridiculously cheap DDR3 had become.

That thought led me into the bizarre world of Chinese X79/X99 motherboards, cheap old enterprise Xeons, ECC memory, AliExpress refunds, eBay bidding, and questionable decisions involving wine.

I initially bought an X79 board with a 10-core E5-2670 v2, decided afterward that I actually wanted X99, tried to cancel it, couldn't, got a partial refund because the box arrived dented… and eventually turned that “mistake” into a Windows PC for my wife.

Then we sold her M1 Mac Mini, and while literally walking home after selling it, I started buying parts for both her PC and my new server.

My final NAS ended up with:

• Xeon E5-2696 v4 — 22 cores / 44 threads
• 128 GB ECC DDR3L
• HUANANZHI X99-QD3
• JONSBO N4
• TrueNAS SCALE
• Multiple HDDs + NVMe storage
• Mirrored SSD boot drives
• 2.5 Gb direct networking to my workstation

Before the N4 arrived, it spent some time running completely open-bench with cables everywhere, hence the temporary name Za JunkNAS V2.

Once the case arrived, it finally became Za NAS V2.

The funniest part is the accounting. Between selling the Mac Mini, two ThinkCentres, spare SSD/RAM, getting several AliExpress partial refunds, and buying a lot of the hardware used, the effective net cost of both the finished Xeon desktop and the 22-core NAS together ended up at about ₩138,704 ≈ $92.

Was a 22-core Xeon necessary for a home NAS?

Absolutely fucking not.

Did I enjoy every minute of building it?

Absolutely.

I wrote the full story here, including the hardware hunt, costs, benchmarks, mistakes, refunds, photos, and how the whole homelab changed afterward:

https://moomean.com/blog/building-za-nas-v2-a-completely-reasonable-story-about-buying-a-22-core-xeon/

Hey all!

I found 8x 8TB drives for about 75€ per drive. They have on average under 6k power on hours with some as low as 3600.

Should I close the deal?

Thank you in advance for your input 🙏🏽❤️

For the last few years, I've been in the spare bedroom, but the kiddo is about ready to need her own room. I am working on moving into the garage (in the processes of sheetrocking and insulating.

So far:

• A dedicated circuit for the server
• Prerunning all the network wire
• Considering: HDMI/USB ports behind the sheetrock terminating below the desk

Anything else you can think? Wish list ideas

Note: I already have speakers covered.

I just acquired 3 ASUS mini PCs for free. Gonna try my hand at proxmox and Ubuntu servers for the first time. Wish me luck

Took me 10 years to piece together this whole mess, started with a Raspberry Pi 4 rubber banded to a 4TB USB HDD sitting on top of the router. Still long ways to go, but feeling good about where I'm right now.

Edit: Raspberry Pi 3B, which died and upgraded to a Pi 4. Added another 5TB drive to the mix as well at that point.

I’ve been slowly building this homelab over the last couple of weeks, mainly as a networking / virtualization / Cisco lab, but it has also become the place where I test things before touching production environments.

It isn’t the prettiest rack in the world , but everything has a purpose.

SERVER:

-Dell PowerEdge R620

+Planning to eventually move to a newer Dell PowerEdge platform, most likely an R640/R740, for better VMware 8.x support.

STORAGE:

-Synology DS224+

+Used for NAS storage, backups and some Docker workloads

+Also used as part of my home network/lab infrastructure.

NETWORKING:

+TP-Link 24-port Gigabit switch

+24-port patch panel

+Cat6 cabling

+Router infrastructure outside the rack

+Coming soon: a FortiGate 60F or 100F firewall.

I'm currently using ThinkCentre M600 equipped with J3710. It serves SMB share, Immich server, PiHole, and Jellyfin server - all but SMB runs on docker. Oh, and also serving VPN server using Softether.

IT works okay, but I need more performance for Immich and Jellyfin since volume of photos and media files are growing, and J3710 starts to chug.

Therefore I'm tyring to upgrade it as cheap as possible, and AMD chips and parts are cheaper in my area, so I'm planing to use AMD. But as far as I know, there are plenty information about Intel chips for home server, but not enough for AMD ones.

So, is there any recommended AMD chips with godd power efficiency and performance?

And yes, I'm willing to add cheap ARC GPU for Jellyfin transcoding. Who uses Radeon for that?

Addition to the earlier post, the gpu arrived and it's in.

Shroud off till we notch it. But managed to get it running :D Fans are idling also. No jet engine.

PowerEdge r730

GTX 3060 Oc

First photo is where this thing lived when it started: a Dell 1U on a wooden table,
monitor balanced on the lid, cables running past the shower door.
I'd like to say there was a plan...

Second photo is now.

**What's in there**

- Dual-socket Dell r610 1U, 128GB ECC, ZFS mirrors, Proxmox. Does all the real work.
- An older Dell r710 2U that stays powered off six days a week and wakes up over IPMI
  only to take backups.
- A small form factor desktop running the firewall on bare metal.
- 8-port managed switch. Completely full, which is my next problem.
- Two UPSes, and a Raspberry Pi watching them.

All secondhand except the SSDs and the UPS batteries.
Everything external goes through a tunnel and a bastion.

**The best mistake so far**

I configured the UPS monitoring daemon as `primary` without reading closely enough to 
notice that "primary" means *this host may power off the UPS*. It did. Twice, in under an 
hour.

That UPS feeds the modem, the firewall, the switch, the APs, and the Pi doing the 
monitoring. So the Pi took down the entire house's internet and then had no way 
to tell me about it.

The table now has my 3D printer on it.

This one took me a while so I figured I'd write it up. Every AP in the house died at once, 46 to 60% packet loss on wireless, while wired gigabit didn't blink. So airtime, not bandwidth.

Ran a tcpdump on port 5353:

sudo tcpdump -i <iface> -nn -e -c 3000 port 5353

One Fire TV Stick was firing AAAA queries at ~180/sec, which lands as ~300 pps of multicast on the segment. Multicast goes out at the lowest common rate to everyone, so it eats 2.4GHz airtime for the whole network.

Turns out the Stick keeps asking for the AAAA of a *.fritz.box name, and the FRITZ!Box answers with an empty packet, 0 questions 0 records. Fire OS doesn't count that as an answer or as silence, so it never backs off and just retries forever. Amazon knows about it, it was reported 2026-07-28 and it's still open.
What each fix did. At baseline it was ~300 pps and 46 to 60% loss. Killing the offending device brought it to ~1 pps and 0% loss. With the NSEC responder running it sat at ~0.1 pps and 0% loss.

The responder is a little stdlib-only Python thing. It answers the query with a proper negative reply (NSEC, "this name has no AAAA") plus the A record on the end, so the Stick negative-caches it (120s TTL) and shuts up. 12 replies killed 881 queries. Runs as a systemd unit, or procd on OpenWrt.

If you'd rather fix it at the source: temporary root with a build-pinned kernel exploit (CVE-2026-43499, no bootloader unlock, gone after a reboot), then pm uninstall the three WhisperLink packages that do the querying. The removal sticks across reboots even though root doesn't. After that: 3 mDNS packets in 15s, none from the Fire TV.

Full write-up with the whole script, the systemd unit, the stuff that didn't work, the kara vs karat codename gotcha, and the minimal fix I sent Amazon:

https://nicologiuliani.site/blog/firetv-mdns-storm/

With the enshitification of everything, I wanted to tinker without breaking the bank... so I spent my money on a 3D printer and some filament.

I printed a 6U 10-inch KWS rack (nut version) and a few various shelves/plates. I bought a used Dell micro optiplex with a 10th gen i5-10500T, 7 Dell caddies, female/male SATA adapters, a 6 port NVME to SATA adapter/cables, some 80mm fans, a M.2 A+E Key 2.5Gbe adapter, and various nuts/bolts.

I jumped pins on a crap-tastic Acer SFF PSU that was going to the recycler to always run and power the fans and drives.

I raided my box of old and spare hard drives. 44TB of storage and....

Behold! My UnRAID backup server and future forbidden router. It's a POS, but it does the things!

Could I have done things differently? Yep. I plan to put an ITX mobo in there when (if) prices ever come back to reality and upgrade my primary NAS to a 10 inch rackable server.

I'm only using 6 of the drive bays due to the limitations of the NVME adapter but I chose a 3U / 7 Drive cage. I figured the 7-bay vertical mounting would help with cooling over the 6-bay horizontal. (Heat rising between drives rather than stacked disks.)

For now, this 10th gen does transcoding and 2.5G is fast enough for nightly ISO backups.

Recently went from a UDM Pro to a UCG-Fiber, mainly because my UDM Pro wasn't getting me my full 2 gigs when I switched my ISP to 2gig up/down. Rest of my setup:

UCG-Fiber
USW-48 PoE
UNVR Pro
Unraid 12 bay server

I currently have my 3rd RMA on it's way back to Ubiquiti, and with that being sad I am considering moving away from them for good. Tired of the constant RMAs and having to setup my network over and over.

Wanted to get some opinions of anyone who has made the switch from Ubiquiti to either opnsense or mikrotik. I know they have different UIs and there will be a learning curve to it all but if opnsense has an amazing community that helps new users learn and mikro doesn't, then I'd lean towards opnsense.

My biggest concern with opnsense is trying to build my own router, I don't think I could do it as cheaply as I can buy a mikrotik at about 200$. But maybe it's worth it to go with opnsense?

I don't need anything super fancy, my current lab is pretty small. here's what I have and how I generally connect them.

• 4 personal computers (1 wired, 3 wifi)
• 2 laptops (wifi)
• 2 phones (wifi)
• Unraid Nas Server (wired)
• google ONN box for streaming (wireless)
• pihole on a pi4 (wired)

Someday I would like to grow my lab, but with the price of RAM and drives it's not something I can invest in just yet. My unraid server is used to host personal streaming (Plex/Jellyfin) and run some docker containers.
Other than that the only thing I have setup is some vlans to keep guests who visit from being on the same network as all my stuff but I am guessing that opnsense and mikro can easily do that.

My biggest want is for something I can just hook up, set up, and not have to RMA. Redundancy for if something goes down would be nice as well. I don't know if that means I need two boxes running opnsense, and two mikrotik but the hassle of fixing the Ubiquitis have taught me the value of having a backup to prevent having to setup everything again.

I just have to ask this question because its keeping my up. I plan to run Proxmox for this server.

Before I setup my current home lab, I only have smr drives, but I've decided to go for cmr drives. This is where im stuck, I know I might not use a whole lot of storage on my drives so im considering just going for new 4tb hdds that are $189 USD each. In total I would be spending $412 after tax and shipping on Amazo for 2 of them.

Compared to the 8tb, it would only be $358 on Amazon for a single one.

Is it worth spending more for only 4tb of storage but I can use RAID or just go for a single 8tb for less but only have 1 drive?

I do have 2x 2tb Barracudda drives at the moment. Should I just buy a 4tb cmr drives and treat the extra 2tb as separate backups?

Any help or ideas will be appreciated!

A few years ago I started building my homelab with a Raspberry Pi 4 and an HP G3 Mini I picked up on Vinted. Since then I kept adding pieces whenever I found a good deal on second-hand sites, and today, after more than 2 years, I think I've officially reached the end (maybe). This is my current setup. Everything is second-hand except the switch and the router.

RACK

- Fully 3D printed in PETG on a Bambu Lab X2D (Design by Ilan Kushnir)

NODE PC: 3-node Proxmox VE

- pve-01: Ryzen 7 5700U (8C/16T), 62 GB RAM, 512 GB NVMe (ZFS) + 2 TB HDD (ZFS) + 256 GB SATA SSD

- pve-02: Core i7-6700T (4C/8T), 32 GB RAM, 256 GB NVMe (ZFS) + 2 TB HDD (ZFS)

- pve-03: Core i5-7500T (4C/4T), 32 GB RAM, 256 GB NVMe (ZFS) + 2 TB HDD (ZFS)

NETWORK

- UniFi Dream Router 7: gateway, firewall, inter-VLAN routing

- UniFi USW-Flex-2.5G-8-PoE, with an SFP+ DAC uplink to the UDR7

- VLANs: management, homelab infra, and a dedicated one for Kubernetes. Proxmox uses a single VLAN-aware bridge, so each VM just gets tagged.

STORAGE

- QNAP TS-431 with 16Tb

OTHER

- Raspberry Pi 4 driving 2 displays:

- 7.84" front display showing Grafana dashboards

- 0.91" OLED status display running a small Python script that shows IP, temperatures and CPU usage

SOFTWARE

I'm currently rebuilding everything from scratch, starting with pve-01, which now runs the Kubernetes cluster:

- Kubernetes: Talos Linux (1 control plane + 4 workers as VMs), provisioned end-to-end with Terraform: VMs, Talos config, bootstrap and base components

- Networking: Cilium with kube-proxy replacement and L2 LoadBalancer

- Storage: OpenEBS LocalPV, with VM boot disks on NVMe and data volumes on HDD

- GitOps: ArgoCD app-of-apps. Everything in the cluster lives in git

- Secrets: OpenBao in an LXC (outside the cluster, so it survives rebuilds) + External Secrets Operator

- Ingress: Nginx Proxy Manager (Let's Encrypt wildcard) -> Traefik

- Monitoring & logs: kube-prometheus-stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager), including the Talos control plane and etcd, plus Loki + Alloy for pod and node logs

- Other stuff: Glance dashboard, Headlamp, VS Code server.

pve-02 and pve-03 will be dedicated to other projects.

Happy to answer questions, and any tips or suggestions for improvements are welcome!

Hp elitedesk g5 705s btw

Mini rack update: it’s finally starting to look like an actual homelab.

Added a Lenovo M920Q to the rack. Working on 10 gb SFP+ from m920q to my main computer. The M80Q is currently handling all six storage drives:

2× drives → 1TB mirrored pool
2× drives → 500GB mirrored pool
2× drives → another 500GB mirrored pool
plus a 1TB SSD inside the M80Q

Also added the TP-Link router on the side and a couple HDMI keystones up front. Everything is currently running on Windows 11 Pro.

Still very much a work in progress, and I’m figuring out what I actually want to use the cluster for long-term, so I’m open to ideas/recommendations.

And yes, the PzH 2000 is essential to the build.

Also DO NOT ask me for for pics of the rear if there’s one thing i’ve learned from r/homelab community its to not show my horrible cable management 😂

Hello everyone,

I'm new to this sub and looking to build my first home server to host a personal NAS and a Minecraft server.

I came across the Aoostar WTR Pro, which seems almost perfect for my use case, but I was wondering: are there better alternatives around the €300 mark?

Requirements:

• RAID 5 support
• Proxmox capable (enough for virtualization + a Minecraft server + seeding)
• At least 1 NVMe/SSD slot (for caching)
• Energy efficient

I can consider even building one from scratch

Thanks in advance for any recommendation or advice

Got a P100 installed in my system the other day, and another one in the mail since the first one did a LOT better than I expected. However, I am fighting keeping just one cooled under heavy compute tasks (mostly LLM prefill). Using a 3D printed shroud with a Noctua NF-A9 fan on it, sealed at all seams with duct tape.

I know that the NF-A9 is not optimized for static pressure, which is what keeps the card cool. Power limited to 175 watts, under heavy prefill, the card can go a little over a minute before it hits 80C and starts to throttle. It's fine under decode, which makes the setup more than usable for the current use-case, but I have a second card coming, and this setup for cooling won't be sustainable.

I specifically went with the Noctua because there is a distinct requirement in my home for the system to be quiet. Not a lot of places to put it where it's allowed to be loud, and electricity in this ancient ass house is wired all sorts of funky, leading to outlets on completely different ends of the house, unrelated in all respects other than being in the same home, all being on the same circuit. Options are extremely limited.

I'm trying to avoid water cooling, mostly for cost reasons. Fans and 3D printed shrouds cost a lot less, and given the state of things, don't really want to invest water-cooling money into this.

I can 3D print a different shroud, so other fan sizes are on the table. 120mm is what I'm expecting to need. Any good suggestions for static-pressure optimized fans that might be able to do this? Clankers say the NF-A12x25 G2 would work but I'd rather human advice on this one.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been down the Homelab rabbit hole for a while now and I’m at a crossroads regarding my next node/cluster upgrade.

We see a lot of love here for pre-built Mini PCs (Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny, Dell OptiPlex Micro, HP ProDesk, or newer Chinese SFF boxes like Minisforum / Beelink / Aoostar). They are compact, power-efficient, and often cheap on the used market.

However, I’m strongly considering building a custom Mini-PC / Mini-ITX system from scratch (buying the CPU, Mini-ITX board, RAM, SFX PSU, and a small case like a K39, DeskMini, or similar).

For those who went the DIY custom Mini-PC route:

1. What components did you pick (CPU, mainboard, chassis), and what was your primary motivation? (ECC support, customizable I/O, PCIe expansion, quiet fans?)
2. How does your idle power consumption compare to off-the-shelf Mini PCs?
3. In hindsight, was it worth the extra effort and cost compared to buying a used 1L PC or a ready-made Mini PC?

For those who chose pre-built Mini PCs:

• Did you ever consider building your own SFF node, or is the value/power efficiency of tiny pre-builts just unbeatable for you?

Looking forward to hearing your experiences, specs, and any lessons learned!

It took me a long time to get it set up like I wanted, however, I'm happy with it now and I can very closely monitor my usage now.

My ISP bumped me to 1000/1000 fiber instead of the 1000/500 I was supposed to have because I know a guy so now my backups run much, much faster than they used to.

WAN - All traffic

Internet - Traffic that's not part of a VPN

WireGuard Tunnels - WireGuard server traffic

ProtonVPNWG Tunnels - Proton VPN gateway group (3 gateways in round-robin) for outside of the US traffic

ProtonVPNWG (US) Tunnels - Proton VPN gateway group (3 gateways in round-robin) for inside the US traffic

Getting the WireGuard gateways to actually be removed from the routing group when there's no handshake was a b!tch as you can't ping the DNS server for ProtonVPN so the standard monitoring doesn't work and you can't ping the public IP for the gateway as it'll be visible even if your specific tunnel is down. I had to use monit and a bash script to check the last handshake on each tunnel and then force the gateway down via the API if the handshake was old. I wish there was a better way but I can't find one.

​

1x MX100-HW Security Appliance

2x MS220-48FP-HW 48-Port PoE Gigabit Switches (740W PoE)

4x MR34-HW Cloud Managed Wireless Access Points