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?
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It may be worth getting a dedicated NAS and also getting a mini pc.
It may also be worth going the 12th gen route. Amazon has great deal used if you look. Sometimes a z690 board has enough features to get a used one over a new low end board. Like pcie bifurcation, more PCIE lanes, maybe more sata ports, 2.5G etc…
Go simple, low power and scale up if needed (it won’t be needed) I started with a 12400, and I barely touch more than a single core
Check Out serverbuilds.net
All depends on how much storage you need. You may be able get away with mini pc and an external usb drive.
I have an old dell optiplex that I shoved into a rosewill case with an HBA card and a stack of drives. That is currently running unraid and a handful of dockers.
It’s been running for a while now, waiting for me to replace my home desktop and recycle those parts into a “new” file server
IMO: A cheap way to get started would be an HP Z4 Gen4 from ebay. They’ll use the larger LGA Xeon chips from Skylake-x/Kaby Lake. Support more RAM and Cores than the traditional i3/i5/i7 boards. No KVM/iLO features, but reliable hardware for a modest price.