For reasons unexplained, you have no homelab hardware, but $1,000 in cash earmarked for the purpose.
What are you buying, what are you installing on it, and how is it different from what you’ve done previously (i.e. lessons learned)?
You must log in or register to comment.
I’d buy the highest memory GPU I could get my hands on and slap it in my computer. I’d be playing with AI because it’s probably going to replace us all in the not too distant future.
People are probably going to be like “wELl Ai HaLOOOsiNaTes or GetS ThiNgs WRonG”. Yep, and so do people. We also had vacuum tubes and literal bugs before we had transistors and metaphorical bugs. This isn’t a steady march to computers everywhere. This is a sprint to see who replaces all thinking work with AI agents first. The controller of the most successful agents will own the labor force.
So, either learn to build and repair the looms or become a luddite. Focus your lab money on AI.
A couple of gen9 Proliant servers. They’re cheap, easy to source, plenty powerful for a homelab, have surprisingly good power management, and they’re much quieter than previous generations (because of the power management). If you go with LFF drives, you can find surplus ones which have plenty of room for homelab stuff. SAS drives are so cheap, I’ve bought enough extra drives to replace any which fail.
For instance: https://www.ebay.com/itm/284061636798 is less than $200 with dual CPUs, a RAID contoller, and iLO for out of band management. You can source memory on eBay for cheap (for instance https://www.ebay.com/itm/266287238575), and as I mentioned, SAS drives are so cheap they’re almost disposable (https://www.ebay.com/itm/225874909271).
So total cost for one of these servers with 128GB memory and four 8TB (24TB usable with RAID 5) drives would be $463.48. You could spin up two of them for less than your $1,000 budget and be able to do a BUNCH of cool stuff with them. Or you could just pack one with like 512GB memory and do everything on one server with virtual machines.
On my gen 9 DL380s with 12 4TB drives, I’m getting ridiculous disk speeds:
[root@neuromancer vms]# dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=16M count=1024 oflag=direct status=progress
16475226112 bytes (16 GB, 15 GiB) copied, 10 s, 1.6 GB/s
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
17179869184 bytes (17 GB, 16 GiB) copied, 10.3636 s, 1.7 GB/sSo over a gig and a half per second direct I/O writes. I spin up VMs on these servers in literally minutes, and I’ve got enough memory to have dozens of virtual machines. I have RHEL, Fedora, and Windows machines (my wife is a Microsoft sysadmin, she tests stuff on those).
The downside is that even with good power management, they do draw a fair amount of power and generate a fair amount of heat. I have three of these in my home office, and during the summer, it kept my office slightly warmer than I like.
For the OS, I use the free developer edition of RHEL - those skills are very marketable. https://developers.redhat.com/. I use RHEL for my VMs so I can play with stuff like NFS services, the automounter, user management, even stuff like OpenShift cluster members as VMs. I’ve learned a lot using my homelab, and it’s helped my career a lot.
That’s about $1000 more than most people have.
My suggestion is invest in networking equipment but it will not cost you $1000. Maybe a switch and a couple mini PC’s and if you have to buy used retail it’s maybe $200. If you want to get into NAS and streaming than you’re looking at spending some money because reliable, preferably fast storage is a must and expensive
Buy a new N100 microPC with 32GB RAM and m.2 drive, Sabrent 5-bay USB_3 DAS, a couple 10TB drives. Easy low-power single box home server with room to expand. You also could add a good switch and box of Cat8 (cable always > WiFi)
Spend the rest on another hobby!
What do you guys do with these home labs?
mini pc to run pfsense on , used managed gig switch, used dell server from ebay. Buy some decent drives with what’s left over.
I got an enterprise class 19" short depth chassis, whit supermicro motherboard and a xeon D (they are soldered to motherboard) whit 8 cores at 2.something GHz, multithreading and so on. Bought a 128GB ecc ram kit and a pair of intel enterprise 1TB ssds. Installed proxmox, whit mirrored discs, and it’s now running 8 containers and 3 vms. Really low power consumption, just a bit loud but perfect for the garage. Placed inside an ikea lack table and mounted up above a door. Avoid buying consumaer class ssds as they are gonna last you only a few months in a configuration like this (that comes from experience, 20% wear in 6 months whit the initial Kingston I bought)
, but $1,000 in cash
not sure how this would help me, I’ve spend 10k or more, but I could get a t-shirt I guess?
N5105 nas board, 32-64gb of ram, 1x 500gb nvme SSD, some sort of case, and a bunch of HDDs, I like the 8tb ironwolfs, they are cheap enough, but large enough.
Maybe the n6005 if you can find it. But it’s a great server, handles most selfhost stuff. I run Ubuntu server on it, it’s just the cleanest and easiest to use, no GUI needed.
What’s nice is it’s super low power, and cheap. So you can eventually migrate to a more powerful Proxmox server, on minipcs, like NAB6, than just turn the n5105 into a TrueNAS server, and even duplicate it for backups, and triplicate (if you are really feeling it), for redundancy. Getting a 2nd and 3rd Proxmox minipcs enables HA on VMs. So yea. That’s my goal. ATM I gotta migrate to the Proxmox.
Same but with a N100 motherboard. Asus and Asrock have some ITX boards with this chip.
I loved migrating to 3 nucs from a 2015 synology, so think you are 100% correct. (It allowed me to use TB networking for a 26Gbe ceph network)
TB = Thunderbolt?
For 1k i would start with a Unifi UDM-Pro, a Intel NUC and a Synology NAS.
Honest question… Why people with knoedge on how to do one, buy a Nas like synology? Are you not just paying double or triple for the same result you could have if making the NAS from scratch?
We use Synology at work to avoid paying CALs on a WS VM
No, you are not paying anywhere near double or triple.
My Synology came in at ~$750 for the chassis and 2 8TB IronWolf drives.
A custom build with TrueNas was coming in at over $1k.
Hm, yeah maybe I just don’t know the pricing/cost of a Synology then.
In my country just the price of a 8Tb IronWolf drive costs almost 1 entire month of the minimum wage here.
The cheapest Synology NAS available here is the DS223J, and it comes with no drives included and costs 80% of two months of minimum wage.
It’s way cheaper to repurpose old hardware or buy from AliExpress and make a DIY build, there is no comparison and also I have no idea of what “custom build” are you mentioning, as most NAS builds I’ve seen are pretty cheap as you don’t need much horsepower and DDR4 memory has low prices nowadays.
I bought a qnap a long time ago, never again…it was like 3k with disk for 6 x 6TB drives like 10 years ago. They constantly get hacked, a bunch of their NAS’s were getting crypto lockered because some Dev hard coded an admin password iirc. their software does a bunch of shit I dont need and it runs like shit now with just me using it. I’m gonna reset it soon once I get my data off.
My NAS now is a r730xd with 12 x 12tb drives in it running true nas. Granted my electric bill is a car payment with all my stuff, it only cost me like 1,500 for disk and the server was super cheap and has a 10 gig connection.
Granted some of it is cool if you are still learning like 1 click and you can have a mysql php server on there ect. I thought about getting a synology but all the bells and whistles it can do with apps and that I can just run on a real server.
Reliability and lower power consumtion than most Frankenstein-DIY cheap stuff recommended here ;)
I regret getting a UDM-Pro and recently swapped it for an n5105 OPNsense box. Luckily they keep their value, so I didn’t lose any money on the UDMP.
Why do you regret that choice?
I have a UniFi system: APs, switches, CKG2, Gateway. I’m looking to add CKG2+ and some POE cameras
After my past Ubiquiti experiences I can’t agree on the UDM…
I’m still a beginner at it, but I would say to not over prioritize cores. Ram will be your bottleneck first. I day this as someone with 36 physical cores and like 90% of them idle
u/diffraa , this is a key point.
At $dayjob, we use 4 GB per core for application workloads and it works well. Databases get 16 GB per core. Memcached gets 32 GB per core. In development we use 16 GB per core because there isn’t heavy load.
My own homelab is built around a bunch of quad cores with 32 GB of memory. The memory has come in useful. Having 64 GB per quad core would be even better, but was not possible when I built the systems many years ago (I bought super cheap $40 motherboards with only two slots). For my initial purpose getting 2x 1 GB sticks would have been enough, but I’m glad I bought more as I use all the memory now.
If you don’t know what you want to do, I would get 8 GB of memory per core at minimum, and in a lightly loaded homelab, 16 GB per core is totally reasonable. I would only get less memory if you know you’re going to hit the CPUs hard with particular tasks that share memory or use little memory, and even then I would get minimum 4 GB per core.
Bought a Dell R630 from ebay for a decent price, but I wish I’ve had spend more on larger capacity hard drives. I bought a bunch of old 600GB HDD running RAID 10 that right now im afraid to replace them.
UDM-PRO, USW-Aggregation, USW-Enterprise-24-POE, U6-LR… build a server with i5/32GB NVMe boot drive, then some RAID drives… I took out a loan in this scenario as $1,000 wouldn’t cover my entire rack getting blown up.
At least 2 mini desktops with as much RAM and ssd that I can get I’m it. Running proxmox and truenas and then setting up my jellyfin, homeassistant, and the rest will be a playground. I am a simple man
https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ Small foot print, low wattage, modern CPU can run anything I can try and throw at it just get a lot of ram. Id run Ubuntu or Debian all apps go in docker containers, maybe install cockpit if I wanted web gui. And run vms if I want via KVM https://ubuntu.com/blog/kvm-hyphervisor If you want to go nas Plex rute you can add a hd via 10g usb Great level1techs video about mini PC home server https://youtu.be/GmQdlLCw-5k?si=VrdfDRfmpNHCZz-H
Everyone here recommending tinylabs, but what if you need lots of TB’s? Is there a solution then? I have a Microserver Gen 8 (which is plenty powerful enough) but need way more space, and was going to buy something that can fit 10+ Hard drives…
There’s lots of solutions.
Cheap:
But a full tower PC case with room for 10+ HDDs. Lot of options like those from Fractal, CoolerMaster, etc.
Enterprise (expensive):
Buy a JBOD with a backplane that you plug all your discs into then plug that into a server.
can you make ZFS pools across devices with Proxmox? Otherwise idk what you do for storage redundancy or RAID unless you run like longhorn or ceph or something across the cluster - all those machines have a single drive