How to choose your first home server! - Cheap and powerful home server!

You already know the value and benefits of having a home server for #homelabbing or #selfhosting. But knowing what to choose for your first home server can be a daunting task! In this video we walk through the options, planning, and decision-making to help you make the best decision for your first home server. In follow-on videos we'll install and evaluate different OSes and systems on the server we built to help give you better ideas on which way to go for your system as well!

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**TIMESTAMPS!**
0:00 Introduction
0:45 Choosing a computer architecture for your home server
4:53 Choosing a form factor for your home server
9:33 Choosing a CPU for your home server
11:00 Finding a system that fits our needs
13:53 A word about Ebay, making offers, and favoriting sellers
14:18 Building out our new home server
15:44 Total cost breakdown for our home server
16:14 Replacing the thermal paste on our Dell Precision 5820 chassis from eBay
17:03 First boot of our freshly built home server
17:20 Final thoughts on the home server
17:46 Closing! Thank you for watching!

[Geno]

I am retired and have always wanted to set up a home server. This is by far the best breakdown I have seen. Great video, keep up the great work.

[hotcher]

Incredible job. Great overview of hardware options explained without requiring the audience to be computer scientists.

[daveyks]

Nice review...but what's next? How do you set up a home server? What operating system are you running? How are you configuring the storage? Sharing to other computers? How are you load balancing?

[michaelac]

I’m about to build my first home server and funny enough I’ll be using a 5820 aswell. I was able to get this one for FREE. The specs are insane! I9 9980XE, P4000 GPU, 128GB ram.

[dunknow]

I build a server with amd 5700G with 128G DDR4, 2TB SSD all in a modified SFF casing at about 700$.

What I really like is, it came with 2.5G ethernet and bigger cache which is more suitable for server purposes

[swampmullet]

This was very helpful! I was originally looking into a used Dell PowerEdge tower for my home server, but they cost twice the price for the older models, and I realized I didn’t need features like dual sockets or redundant power supplies. Didn’t know how cheap the Precisions were until recently, and for how new they are too, I bet you can get a lot more life out of them. Looking into the Precision 5820’s now, already got a Jetway box picked for the home networking, also gonna try to find a low powered NAS to back everything up

[smoothspringssoundsmeditat]

You are very good in what you do It's like listening to a Smart teacher. Thank you.

[MindCaged]

I've been recently considering setting up a server for the fun of it and maybe some practical use. I can't see a need for a super extensive system like you showed here, I can't even think of enough services I would want it to run. I've been playing currently with an old 2009 dell desktop which is barely powerful enough to run the tasks I've asked of it, but it's seriously lacking in cpu cores and RAM. I've seen some much better spec-ed hardware listed for around $200-300 with much lower power consumption, but I hesitate to pull the trigger on that because I'm honestly not sure I have enough services that I'd /actually/ use on a regular enough basis to justify buying it, it might come in handy for certain tasks, but not much I'd need running all the time.
I see all these videos talking about what the setup on their homelab servers, and mostly I see them just list OSes and VM hosts and such, and I'm like great, so you can setup a bunch of VMs/containers, what do you /actually/ have them doing that needs to run all the time and justifies the power/cost of the server?

[foxale]

I went with two EPYC 3251 based servers, my power bill was already too high. A decent balance between power consumption, cost and performance at the cost of upgradability.

[robwal]

I personally love the dell workstation line. I have been using the 7600 series with 2 proc and 512gb ram with SSDS for a few years now. ran proxmox but back to esxi. I recently got a second raid card and move my Truenas Scale storage from a hp microserver to a VM. It is a super quiet wife approved system.

[lonxx]

I use two old computers for my home lab, it's not the most powerful computers but it's enough for my lab.

TRUENAS Server : i5 4670 / 16Gb RAM / 3x 4 To RAID Z-1, it runs Jellyfin and SMB Share with S3 Backup.
Proxmox server : i5 4670 / 16Gb RAM / 2 x 1 To SSD, it runs Nextcloud, Pi-Hole, NGNIX, and Home Assistant.

I've bought them for cheap, and are quite efficient. Next i will bought a ZimaBoard in order to install PfSense to make a Firewall.

[Polarzbek]

Been thinking about a home server for ESXI for a while now and this is the best breakdown on hardware I've seen recently. Thanks for the video, a like and a sub from me!

[JustClem]

Solid video covers the basics to get people into networking! Hardware, server type, form factor, architecture, storage, fucking nailed it! Simple to follow too (Also pro tip) depending on your use case, low end gpu's or none at all isnt a bad idea. VM's generally need those graphics tho

[MADBONE]

Barebone case with 950w psu
Then add a cheaper w-2125 😅
16gb ECC 2666mhz
Rx580 and got yourself a gaming PC 😅 can be used for server in the future ;)

[freddyhardware]

I was given one (Dell PowerEdge R210 II) by a guy from marketplace last month (Dec 2023). Now I have two more. R620 and T410 in an 18RU Server Rack. Now I'm hooked and I'm blaming that guy 😅

[tomduncan]

I am using casaOS on my media server. Works like a charm and easy to maintain from a web ui

[rmo]

I interviewed at a place that did refurbishments like this. It was pretty interesting.

[suekuan]

The de t5820 is tricky. I bought one that had 4 sata flexbays. I thought just buying the dell m2 nvme flexbay would work. You also have to buy a backplane for the nvme flexbays after taking out one of the 2 sata backplanes. The cables for the nvme flexbays fit to some connectors in the motherboard, plus the heat sensor cable. So, know your stuff for this model. Also the is a sas backplane i believe. I may resort to a pci card solution if the above is too much work as well as potential added costs

[SkysTrains]

im making a new homelab and will be using these tips, thank you. i plan to use a small 10" rack with multiple small 1L systems for a nas, router, and just a general server. i will also have a desktop with multiple gpu's as a multi gaming server

[cinemaipswich]

I stated with a 12 year old Dell, but it cost me a huge amount of money to run, and was rather weak in performance. Then I found a 32 core, 68 thread AMD server that was 4 years old and cost me half the price.