Downsizing my Home Lab to a SINGLE PC

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[anthonyherchenroder]

I think you missed an important point on this system. This is what I call a “nickel and dime” server. If you can’t come up with $800 bucks at one time you can still build this server 100-150 bucks at a time and end up with the same result while continuing to use it in the meantime. I think this kind of build is more relevant in today’s economy than a pure budget build.

[drakkon_sol]

I'm rocking a Dell PE-T110ii with 4x8TB drives, 16GB DDR3, a TESLA P4 and a Xeon E3-1260L.

I bought this a year ago for $50, completely intact, and have been happy with it so far.
This is my NAS, Plex, MC, Cloud, file-sharing server, and I love it.

Who needs screaming fast & expensive hardware when the only person I do this for is myself.

I did the old opti 9020 USFF with usb drives+enclosures, upgrading to more ram, an i7-4785T, and an additional ssd in a dvd adapter, because it was CHEAP and yet Capable.

Im not spending ~$800, but I'm not doing the same level of services you are. But this kind of approach, where you utilize old tech to suit your needs, is really the best way, imo, and also more fun to see what you can reliably squeeze out of it while still having the system do it without breaking a sweat.

[yramagicman]

Your starting machine plus the 2 4tb drives is my current home lab, almost exactly, just in a different box. I love it. It effectively free for me since it's an old PC of mine.

[dominick]

I'm really happy with my setup. 2 E-Waste laptops and raspberry pi-5 run in a q device for proxmox. Each proxmox node backs up to backup server on the other node. And although I don't have anything like ha I do have redundancy in many of my services whether there's a hot backup or I could just click on another one on the other node and be back up and running. Dual pinholes dual tailscale vpns. Even a backup for my router if it goes down.

[aaronmorrow]

One thing if you're looking at adding a GPU to your NAS: Sparkle has a single-slot LP ARC A310 for $99. It's got almost the gaming performance of the RX6400, but it has phenomenal encoding for h264, h265, and even AV1. A lot of people buy ARC GPUs just for the AV1 transcoding, and this is the cheapest way to get into that, plus it fits into any PC. Even if you're not gaming on your network-in-a-box, it's great for passing through to PLEX and having better transcoding than an older QuickSync GPU.

[BerserkPublishing]

Dude, this took me back, way back, to 1991. I had a 386sx. I used it to host a BBS as well as use it for my Turbo C coding and compile environment for college. I had 4 meg of RAM and 40 Meg of HDD. (Not a typo.) I don't think you're as old as me, but something tells me, you can relate to those specs, if only from having learned about them in school. Great video. I spent my career as a back end guy, mostly BI and Data Warehouse systems. I'll admit, I should have a home server, but after 27 years of living the "dream" I fell back into my old hobby of Flight Sims, X-Plane and MSFS, and picked up writing fiction to satisfy that old creativity itch I used to scratch with coding. Great video, I'm a subscriber now.

[rubehickscube]

Similar consolidation that I just did was getting 5 $50 mini-PCs, a $10 TP-Link switch, and a Synology NAS. The reason for this is because some people just give away a blank Synology if it doesn't have storage, but if you already have hard drives then it works well. I have two 6TB hard drives I've had for a while that I put in the NAS for long-term storage and back up my ProxMox nodes. The 4 mini-PCs have 250GB SSDs each that you can get for free from microcenter during their promotion. So all total I have about $300 in a small "server".

All plugged in to the same switch, they can be VLAN'd off and I 3D printed a mount for them all with the switch so it's just one singular box with a few power cables coming out. But, if one node completely fails me, like it lights itself on fire and I can't fix it, I still have 4 other nodes to pick up the pace until I get that node replaced with any other mini-pc.

Works well for me!

[ragtop]

Did something very similar with a HP 800 G4 EliteDesk...i7-8700, 64GB RAM, and a couple of network cards (2.5G). Installed Proxmox and then the possibilities were endless at that point. It is the center of my home automation and NAS backups, and an extra Windows 11 VM I use for testing. The i7-8700 is 6 core 12 thread. These are awesome for homelabs !! I think the G4 with a i7-8700 gives the most bang for the buck.

[HaydonRyan]

A lot of the docker container setups offer a hidden efficiency option - always opt for the alpine tagged version vs Debian or other. disk footprint is about 50%. It would be interesting to do a follow up to this taking some of the networking advice that others have stated, and also trying some chaos testing on the machine - that would be awesome.

Also another idea for a new home server would be a local LLM server, connected into homeassistant. Unfortunately that would be pretty hard to make performant and inexpensive but would love to see you try!

[sanderdelft]

Kudos for calling out the lack of backup options on a single server homelab. Newbies beware. How do you restore your VMs when your NAS is virtualized on a server which is down.

Would love a video on backup options for this scenario tbh.

[cdnron]

Nice to see a video about running a home lab on a smaller scale. It sucks that the PC can't support a 7th gen CPU. I'm running a similar setup but with an EliteDesk G3 SFF and it does support both 6th and 7th gen. I picked up a barebones unit for $28 CAD and installed a 7th gen CPU and 16GB RAM that I already had. It also has onboard NVMe so I bought a new NVMe drive for it. I already had 2 x 5TB drives that I installed and it all works great with TrueNAS Scale.

[stey]

I'm running my homelab on a Dell 3060 that I got for free, i3 6100t and 16gb of ram. Upgraded it with a 1tb crucial mx500 for proxmox and added an 8tb hard drive for file storage and it's hosting Jellyfin, adguard, NAS, home assistant, tailscale, entire ARR suite for linux ISOs. Not bad for a system that was destined for the trash.

[monkeyrebellion]

An alternative that I found with my personal system: pass the integrated net card to pfsense and then create 2 extra virtual net cards that are VXNet. The first one should be client network and associated with a physical port. The second is a service network for the VMs to communicate with jumbo frames.

This helps all comms stay within the box. The service net isn't required but you can get some speed boosts and lower CPU usage with jumbo frames.

[nddulac]

I'm running my entire home server collection on an ODroid H3+ with two 6 TB hard drives in Raid-0. This is just running a desktop-less install of Debian as a host for Docker. And as you pointed out, all the stuff in Docker doesn't take up that much in terms of resources. The H3+ sports a Pentium Silver N6005, and 16 GB of Ram. Hey - it works for me!

[TheKamil]

i managed to not understand any of this server stuff but stayed hyped up

[mt_kegan]

Well done video sir. This kind of info is great for people who are kinda serious about getting into homelab. Not too cheap, but keeping it realistic. I started 10 years ago with 2 HP D530s. Gotta start somewhere!

[LtGen.Failure]

I'm still a fan of using retired server gear like E5 Xeons and Supermicro Boards. My "new" main server (E5-2680V2/X9SRL-F) is idling at around 60W and is literally whisper quiet. This stuff is old but you get more IOMMU-Groups for passing devices through to VMs and DDR3 registered ECC RAM is dirt cheap. The board even supports PCIE-bifurcation so i can use multiple NVME drives quite easily. For smaller setups i prefer the intel N100 series. Low cost, very low power consumption and more than enough computing power for these tasks using ProxMox and TrueNAS Scale.

[blademan]

HP Z840 workstation. $300. Built like a tank. Amazing cooling.. 16 DDR4 ecc slots, 2 PCI x16, 2 x4, 1 x1. Add 2nd cpu, and you get another x16, and another x8, and the x4 becomes a x8. 4 hot swap 3.5” drive bays sas or sata. 2 x 5.25” bays, 6 sata and 8 sas onboard, 825 or 1125W PSU. Oh, and it’s super quiet. If you find and install the 3D vapor CPU coolers, custom engineered for this box, you can run it full power 2x cpu, and there is no difference in noise level at idle or maxxed out.

[elmestguzman]

That is a cool set up. I have been running a PfSense vm for 3 years no issues. You could have saved a PCI slot by using in 2.5G for the router WAN and the other as the main link out of PMOX. Used the VNIC for the LAN port in PfSense and TrueNAS. The Virtual NICs in PMOX are 10G.

[DaemonForce]

I love these little boxes. They're waaaay more than suitable as a home server and a few SBs have caught on to that idea a year ago when I was trying this out on hardware that rides the line. Turns out I don't need much and I really mean that.

Athlon 64, 2GB DDR2, ~20TB storage, 10GbE SFP..✓💯 Works out great.

Something like a multicore chip with onboard graphics would be like a rocket. Anything made within the past 3-6 years would definitely be put to better use as a workstation but you get the idea. There's a few lines to be drawn for this and that. It's best to define them and then build based around that.