Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

64 pointsNilrem40495 comments

Obviously interested in all of it, but here is what I am rally trying to solve:

I live in an apartment, so unfortunately I cannot run full fat rack mounted equipment for space, heat, and noise reasons. Also, a partner who isn't keen on the sight of it

I was thinking maybe some small thinkcenter or dell micro PCs + a NAS (Thinking QNAP because they are cheaper). Lower TDP would be great too. Power costs are a concern.

Thinking about Nextcloud, plex, jellyfin, home assistant, local backups, etc... I know that it evolves quickly

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My movie triaging and conversion thing, basically a personal Netflix. This one has been rock solid and requires zero maintenance. There are better torrent-based options nowadays, I think.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/home-server

The other is my timeline thing. I love the idea, but messed up the implementation. It's a bloated mess that I dread working on. It should be a presentation layer for my /backup directory, not an opinionated backup solution cum data archive management system.

I plan to rewrite it into a much simpler project.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline

The last one is Syncthing, since a week or two. It's much simpler than Google Drive or the timeline thing's elaborate rsync setup, so it will replace both.

A while ago, I read that "a person's main task is not computing, but being human". This has heavily influenced my relationship with technology, including the tech I create for myself. I want calm technology that blends into my life, and self-hosted software is rarely that.

https://calmtech.com/

Asus pn50, awesome mini PC. Its also very silent, small, and looks good, so I keep it in the living room, running all the time.

External drive, 18 TB

hosts bunch of web services 24/7 - calibre, jelyfin, qbittorent, hfs web server to host files, tailscale vpn etc. The 4k projector, TV, and HiFi are connected to it. I can even do programming on it from the sofa when I feel like it.

great for surfing the web, hording, media and even games.

basically 0 maintenance

I hate dedicated stuff like synology, and non-applications they provide - its too much work and configuration, too expensive too and they feel toyish. I prefer OTB full OS (Windows 10 in my case) with normal tools (for example foobar player, vscode editor, doublecmd file manager, mvp video player, normal package manager) and easy to use and replace stuff. For example, I use another external drive for periodic backups, with custom powershell scripts that do incremental backups and verify them, disconnected all the time until backup should be done (to protect from viruses and surges). I can take backup drive with me for offline consumption of all the data, or access my network via VPN (you definitelly need offline access to your data as internet connection may suck when you are not at home)

Its all under 1k EUR.

The hardware I have is:

  - 12th Gen Intel NUC with an i7-1260P, 64GB of RAM and 1TB NVMe drive
  - Synology DS920+ with three 10TB WD Red drives, NVMe cache and upgraded RAM
  - Mikrotik hAP ac3 router
  - APC Back-UPS BX 750VA UPS

I run Proxmox on the NUC and have a Kubernetes cluster in VMs. Any stateful services mount storage from the NAS via NFS. The UPS can keep all of this up for about 30 minutes. Data gets backed up to a Hetzner storage box via Synology Hyper Backup.

I monitor the power consumption with a smart plug and Home Assistant. It averages around 100W for everything above.

The stuff that I have running includes Gitea, Matrix, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Pi-hole, Home Assistant, and some small websites.

If you're interested, here's what it all looks like, running next to me as I type this in my kitchen/office: https://i.imgur.com/duOM2Bh.jpg

Could you tell me more about the NVMe cache? My understanding is that it’s not officially supported on a DS920+. A few questions if you don’t mind:

- How did you go about setting it up?

- What are the benefits of adding one?

- Can you use it with 4 HDDs installed?

- Which NVMe do you use?

I upgraded the RAM on mine to 20GB and saw massive performance gains, so I’m curious if adding an NVMe cache down the line would have similar performance increases.

Thinkpad x280 with 1TB internal SSD and external drive for backups. 16GB of ram. Have been running on thinkpads for twenty years. Always power, screen, keyboard at the ready.

Mostly services just run native on Debian. Gitlab, a few websites, Nextcloud, Minecraft. All data is located in /data which I backup once a year since family pictures are not more important than my time.

I'm running

AMD EPYC 7302 in Supermicro H11SSL-i rev 1. hacked to use Rome CPU (as the microcode can be replaced in BIOS update, this saved quite a few bucks)

128GB DDR4 ECC RAM

2x 1TB NVMe drives

2x 14TB hard drives

Running Proxmox, Kubernetes, Ceph, a couple of game servers and my personal Docker passthough server (you can actually use Docker remotely, with the caveat that local mount binds are not available). In the future it will also run my Github Actions self hosted runner and a couple more CI workers. Basically using it as my Threadripper alternative (the parts are all decommisioned server hardware that comes in cheap -- even the CPU is quite cheap to say the least)

Love my synology, I’ve been using it for 12 years now. I will upgrade at some point to latest 4bay version

Second Synology. Mine has purred along for years, low power (30 watts 4 hdds at high load) and easy to manage with containers.

Everything is fast thanks to an SSD and caching m.2. I max out 1gbit over SMB.

Snapshots have saved potential days/weeks worth of troubleshooting in total and is a must have. Cold backups are easy with Hyper Backup.

I couldn't ask for more.

I used to have a QNAP and replaced it with a Synology, but I was actually a little disappointed with the software when it came to the disk management. I had a funny collection of disks capacities and Synology has fewer options when it comes to volume spanning and RAID.

My parents' old PC. Circa 2011 motherboard with 2x 4TB spinning rust drives via SATA and an SSD plugged into a USB port to boot TrueNAS. 16GB RAM iirc. Only aftermarket part is a 1gig ethernet PCIe card. For basic file storage, pihole+wireguard termination inside VMS, and occasional one to two user streaming, it does the job fine. My biggest gripe is power usage; it probably makes fiscal sense to do a build from scratch just to bring down the power consumption.

I'm using a Nvidia Jetson Nano.

It's basically like a Raspberry Pi, but with a beefier GPU. It's not extremely fast, but is decent as a web and file server.

TDP is extremely low, 3W idle, 8W top.

Are you using the Nano Developer Kit or some third-party for-production version? I'm asking because my understanding was always that the Dev Kit is not meant for constant use / sustained load.

I have: 1. An old i3 running TrueNAS after I decided my QNAP TS-503 was too old and shonky to be able to run Plex; 2. An ex-govt i5-6500 with 32GB RAM for miscellaneous development activities; 3. An RPi 4 that runs prometheus/grafana for monitoring; 4. A Khadas Vim3 that currently runs some crypto-related analytics, but is mostly for fun/experimentation; 5. A 2015 Macbook (12") that's been gutted all the way down to the logic board, with a combination power/ethernet dongle hanging off it, running Linux as a headless machine for more mucking around/non-serious stuff; 6. A work-issued Macbook Pro (M1 Pro); 7. A Windows desktop with a Ryzen 5 2600, 32GB RAM, a 2Tb nvme and a 1660Ti for gaming; 8. Aforementioned QNAP TS-503 gathering dust.

If I'd change anything, I'd turn the Khadas into a media PC and plug it into my TV and retire my broken old AppleTV (some older generation that doesn't allow installing apps), I'll inherit my wife's 12" Macbook and add wire it up the same way as the other one, and then get rid of the i5 and bring the power consumption down a bit (the Core M-5 in the 12" Macbook is surprisingly powerful, and with the I/O on the Macbook, it'd beat the i5 hands-down, aside from the RAM limitations). At some point I'd love to build a small cluster of ARM boards when they step up in capability a bit (and when I can find some reasonably priced ones that can support 32GB RAM or more), and then any dev stuff I do can run in minikube or something similar. I'd like to play around with RISC-V at some point too.

For your purposes... I'd recommend a thin formfactor with a decent CPU, 64GB RAM and as much storage as you can stuff into it, then run TrueNAS.

I have two in use:

Newest is a HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini, i7-6700T, 32GB RAM, 1TB M.2 SSD. I had the SSD, the machine was ~$100US on eBay, and came with 1 stick of 16GB RAM so a matching second was only ~$24. I think right now I could pick up the same for about $200 including the SSD. It runs Proxmox with a few VMs for Minecraft, dev work, a Windows desktop, etc. Really a pretty capable machine for light-ish duty. I can barely hear the fan most of the time and just 35W TDP.

Older is a Gigabyte Brix with a Celeron J4105, 8GB RAM, and an M.2 SATA SSD. It's primarily been my Plex server but hosts a couple Docker containers and a website. It has four external USB3 hard drives. They're getting pretty old but I sometimes see them pop up in usable configs for ~$100 on eBay. I normally never hear the fan (the hard drives are louder) and just 10W TDP.

I'm really considering getting another ultra small form factor like that HP, but with the 7th gen i7 so it has hardware support for encoding HEVC / H265.

I've also had an old i3 Thinkpad running until recently. Also nearly silent and bonus that it has it's own battery and display/keyboard when I need to debug something.

I got the i5 8gb version for $62 off of eBay for Home Assistant after seeing rpi4 prices. Very cool system in such a compact size at an unbeatable price.

You could consider an M2 Mac Mini. Can be had for ~$800 CAD, low power consumption, small footprint, and of course a decently powerful CPU.

The Mac Mini is a nice computer, but macOS mostly sucks as a server OS and linux options are limited. After you consider the base specs, $800 gives you a poor offering compared to other SFX PCs, moreso once you add the markup on any spec upgrades.

The CPU and associated power usage is nice, but I don't think it will pay for itself in that regard.

You can easily run Linux VMs on it though.

I have an Asrock Deskmini. It's a nice half-way between a NUC and something more beefy like a mITX system. I wanted a more powerful desktop-class processor, which is good for transcoding when using jellyfin for example, and has options for more storage than a NUC.

It tops out at a higher power, but idle is something like 15 watts, so still low enough to forget about.

I use mine as a desktop, TV, and router/access point. Apart from dhcp/DNS no services consistently hosted. It goes down every day or so.

3 x HP t630 thin clients. Each with upgraded RAM and SSDs.

Each run proxmox, clustered together. Very cheap, low power and surprisingly not terrible. No fans so quiet too.

These aren't going to be good for Plex though. But the rest they'll do just fine.

For plex you probably want something like a NAS (bought or self made), with a good GPU for hardware transcoding. Note that doesn't necessarily mean separate GPU, I think you might be able to use quicksync on most Intel CPUs now.

I have a dedicated TrueNAS Scale box with something like 48TB of raw SSD storage running Emby in the official apps. And the stuff to populate said SSD storage with media. Bit overkill really, but fun.

Also have another big 32 thread AMD machine for 'work' home labbing - i.e. learning, tinkering and breaking stuff. It's separate from my personal cluster for security and for reasons of the personal stuff being a bit more important to me that it runs, hence the cluster and failover.

I use an HP ProLiant Microserver with four drives in a ZFS RAIDZ array and an SSD for the OS. For software, I mostly run it in Docker using a very small container orchestration program I wrote:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster

An old AMD 2400G, low-power but I miss intel quick sync for Plex. A few 12TB drives. Running Unraid as the OS because it is a nice mid-point between running Proxmox for managing VMs/Docker and TrueNAS for the storage side. Ultimately, I just don’t want to worry about servers at home where possible.

Home server is house in an Inter-tech 4u4416, a crappy case, don't buy.

A supermicro motherboard with a 1.6 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2603v3 CPU. 32 GiB ECC memory.

Operating system on a 256 GiB samsung SSD. Main storage on 8x12 TiB HGST HUH721212ALE604 in zfs raidz2 Secondary (backup) storage on 4x5 TiB HGST HDN726050ALE614, zfs zraid2 (only some things are backed up to this). Storage controllers are just plain sata controllers on the motherboard + 2x pcie sata controllers.

Tertiary backup storage on supermicro server that I got for cheap, actually a faster machine, only 16 GiB ram, but 2x xeons, faster ones. That chassis has 36 disk slots on SAS backplanes and SAS controller.. But the machine is older and uses more electricity so I only manually turn it on every 2 months to sync (using zfs send/recv), the disks in that is whatever random stuff I find.

u4416 you say?

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%90%96

8x3TB btrfs RAID1, Intel i5, 1050Ti in an Elite 120 case. The original build was in 2017, and it’s been slow upgrades since.

It stays in the TV cabinet in our living room.

https://captnemo.in/setup/homeserver/

Homelabbing was my covid hobby. 2 Years ago I splurged on a r720xd and it's been a beast of a NAS. However, I too live in an apartment with a partner that isn't keen on the sight, heat, noise, and cost of electricity it produces, so it stays off most of the time. But I have a lot of personal data I've been hoarding for years (decades?) so I'm happy to have it safe, accessible, and local, even if mostly cold.

My always-on-device is some old PC parts (i7, 32g ram) running unraid on 2 ssd's (256g in parity) and docker services. For example this where Jellyfin will run while mounting assets remotely from the 720.

Finally, I have a brocade switch and a protectli box laying around that I've been saving for a rainy day to setup opnSense and 10G networking.

A fleet of three ThinkCentre PCs, m920x2 and m720x1, they use 8th Gen Intel CPUs. These three run Windows 11, Arch Linux, and macOS. Homelab is running mostly on the Arch Linux one with Docker supplemented by the Windows 11 one running some longer time job because Windows only upgrades every few months.

I also have a FriendlyELEC, an arm box that is running OpenWRT as a router and also serves Ubiquiti's controller.

There is two part of software/hardware I should be retiring/moving; both are Homebridge, one on Raspberry Pi Zero W and one on another Windows PC Hyper-V Ubuntu, but I just don't have time to move them yet. The Raspberry Pi Zero is especially annoying because it is so underpowered that it feels painful to wait for anything to upgrade.

I'm rocking an older Intel NUC8i5BEK sitting next to a Synology 2-bay NAS. I don't have heavy requirements on performance, I just needed something reliable and quiet, low power usage is a plus. It's been pretty solid. For a while I ran ESXi on it, then I decided to switch to KVM (that was a mistake, trying to make the networking sane was damn near impossible), and now I've condensed everything down to just working on a single OS instance so it runs Ubuntu on bare metal.

I probably should have stuck with ESXi. Running Home Assistant as HAOS has some conveniences that may be worthwhile depending on how much like you to tinker. But it also runs totally fine in a Docker container and that has it's own upsides.

I recently replaced an old, power hungry 2U server with a laptop.

I wanted a NUC, but as it turns out a used laptop on Ebay could fetch the same specs (i7-1185G7, 16gb) for less than half the price of the equivalent NUC (without an SSD or memory).

An added bonus is you get a UPS and KVM included!

My NAS is in an ATX mid case (Antec 900 that I've had for 15+ years) with a used xeon e3, 32 GB of RAM, and 40TB of storage in a zfs mirror. Running TrueNAS with MinIO, Postgres, and MariaDB in containers.

Compute is more sleek. I have an AsRock DeskMeet with an i5 12400, GTX 1650 super, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB m.2. Running around 25 containers and not even having to work hard. The GPU handles transcodes for both Plex and Jellyfin, and most volumes are NFS shares from the NAS.

This iteration of hardware has been running since early this year and it's very performant and quiet. I took out all the fans but the 200mm exhaust in the NAS and can only hear the DeskMeet when the CPU fan really kicks up.

I have desktop 13900k+4090 that is in permanent hope to be transformed into homelab style server with something like esxi/hyperv for you pass through into one client vim where I will do windows work/some gaming and when windows not in use passthrough to Linux vim for stable diffusion , also one ubuntu vm for Linux workstation. I really don’t like dual boot/VMware workstation.

For small stuff I have raspberry 4b 4gb and 2 drive symbology nas.

I have gaming asus router axe-11000, but want to switch to 10gb Ethernet, and that will lead to upgrading nas too. A lot of stuff is limited by the fact that I’m renting so even dropping cable to fiber modem in garage was adventure

For storage I have

My recommendation would be using an old laptop you have laying around, or picking up a used Lenovo T series laptop for 300-400USD on ebay. Try to find a CPU with 10000+ score on cpubenchmark.net, and 16GB+ memory. Plug in whatever storage you want with USB.

I'm running an old desktop in my basement.

i7-2600

16 GB RAM

2 hard drives: 1.5 TB system, 14 TB network storage

Runs:

HAProxy

A custom written blog on Payara

PostgreSQL

Funkwhale

Pi-Hole

ReadyMedia/miniDLNA

nginx (for webdav)

Used to run Jitsi and Ergo IRCd, but haven't needed them anymore

Since I've recently moved my daily driver desktop to the basement (with the help of long cables and a hole in the floor), I might eventually use KVM to run them off the same box.

I used the SilverStone Sugo Series SG02B-F-USB3.0 (https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/computer-chas...). I wanted to upgrade my desktop so I moved the motherboard and power supply into it. I picked it because it has quite a bit of space for drives (should last me a very long time). I don't have a separate NAS, this holds the storage and runs the services.

I run Jellyfin, Torrents, some backups, Minecraft, Matrix server, a Matrix bridge, Metabase, Mumbe server Navidrome and a few odds and ends.

CPUs are various Haswell-era Intel Xeons. RAM is, in all cases, 32GB (4x8GB) UDIMM DDR3 UDIMM. There are always multiple disks, some in ZRAID10 configuration. SSDs are purchased new, while spinning disks are all refurbished enterprise disks.

I wouldn't recommend what I do, the platform was a bit of a dead end and I've just randomly chosen a lot of this...

    CPU: Threadripper 2920x
    RAM: 128GB DDR4-3600 (ECC would make more sense, I think)
    Disk: RAID1 gen4 NVMe for the OS, two 5x5TB RAIDZ-2 volumes for long term storage
    GPU: Arc A750 for transcoding
    NIC: *bonded* 10GbE (SFP would be cheaper)

In a regular desktop chassis, in the corner of my office, with one of the sets of drives coming from an attached pod

This is mainly a NAS/transcoding box that happens to run a lot of VMs -- varying purposes, mostly what you'd expect with testing a lot of Ansible

I use old Mac Minis. You can find some decent cheap ones on eBay. They run quiet, have a small footprint and have all the ports I need for projects. I run OpenBSD on them but Linux support is robust for those as well.

3x NUCS, two 5th gen i3's and a 5th gen i5 all with 16 GB of ram. Running a proxmox cluster across them hosting a couple vms as container hosts to run all my services including grafana, prometheus, plex, tinytinyrss, calibre server, homeassistant, a reverse proxy and nextcloud. And then really whatever I'm playing with at the time, kubernetes, rocks, etc.

I also have a dell micro with a 6th gen i7 and 16GB ram I use as my primary windows machine, but previously it was hosting all the aforementioned services by itself.

I'd go with some kind of mini PC and an external drive or two, or direct attached storage rather than a synology

I live in an apartment (Paris region, to get an idea of the climate) and my datacenter is located on the top shelf of a cupboard.

The main server is an old tower, ca. 6 years old. It costed 600€ at that time: a Skylake processor and 12 GB RAM. I use it to run about 20 services via docker (it includes the ones you mentioned). It is more than enough.

I used to have a small PC (chinese, bought on Aliexpress for about 150€ I think) to run Pihole (filtering, DHCP, DNS) but I moved it to my Internet box (yes, we have internet boxes that allow you to run VMs on them).

This with a Cisco switch, a Ubiquity AP and a UPS.

Total power is 60W, the temperature is around 35°C.

I built my home server in 2013 and it is still going strong. It is based around an ASRock E350M1 with integrated AMD E350 dual-core processor [0].

It sports 4GB RAM an old 64 GB SSD for the operating system (debian) and three 2 TB HDDs in a btrfs RAID1 array giving ~3TB of usable space which is plenty for my own needs.

It runs the following services:

- DNS server (unbound + custom domain filtering)

- Syncthing

- OpenVPN client & server

- PostgreSQL + lighttpd + PHP for various small websites

- Samba & NFS

- Transmission (for linux distros of course)

[0] https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/E350M1

I switched to a trio of N95 mini PCs (two from Beelink, one I can't remember but was bought from Geekbuying. These plus some SSD upgrades (from 256->512 GB) and RAM (8->16GB) allows me to have a pretty cheap, very low power real "HA" setup. I run Rancher and k3s on it.

The N100 is slightly more expensive but also has an even lower TDP.

What's nice is that for software that can use an Intel iGPU for hardware video transcoding, these are more than powerful enough to do so and yet draw significantly less power than a full fat GPU. Unless you want to run an LLM or something like Stable Diffusion...

For a long while I was using one (a few in fact) HP MicroServers across the range N36, N40, N56 etc. I recently picked up an 8th Gen one which is a little more powerful, and have moved everything onto that. That includes Plex Media Server, backups, torrent server and ssh end point. It got noisy in my office, so I moved it out, and am much happier. I have four 3TB disks in Linux MD RAID 5, running on Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS. I do need to consider a disk upgrade at some point, as it's going to run out soon. That'll be a fun migration!

I run a N100 (6W TDP, 12W system draw) mini pc that is attached with a Synology DS220+ with nfs. The N100 mini pc was about $160 after tax and even though it it’s 4 core 4 thread, it doesn’t even sweat running jellyfin, home assistant, and my NVR. With NFS, you can mount the volume to mount only when the data is accessed so your Synology NAS actually goes to sleep when you don’t use jellyfin. It’s serious money saving in terms of electricity.

As for the server backup, I just use active business backup on the Synology NAS which does rolling snapshots of the whole volume.

Recently upgraded and have similar space constraints; I've shoved an i5-13500, 1xM2 NVME SSD, 2x2.5" SSDs, 6x3.5" HDDs into a Fractal Design Node 304, with a Silverstone ECS-07 replacing my old LSI HBA.

~700GB of cache/ container volumes on the 2.5"s as a mergerfs pool, ~38T across the HDDs in mergerfs+snapraid.

Noise and heat are kept at a meaningfully low level, and the case blends in appropriately with the living room. All the normal home-cloud workloads, along with k8s homelab stuff (so I can computer janitor in my free time).

It varies a lot, but for a while I had a Synology NAS + a simple AMD PC running Unraid, a lot of Docker containers and some VMs. But I realized I was mainly running services that are idle most of the time, and just doing some I/O the rest of the time. So I upgraded to a bigger Synology (and extra RAM) and moved all the stuff there. I still have a ton of containers and a few VMs, and the hardware is still overkill. I do have a pre-pandemic Raspberry Pi 4 that I use for stuff like Jellyfin and a surveillance cam.

My homelab has

1) a NAS/Server with 10700 + 12 TB HDD x 15 forming a ZFS, with 128GB of RAM.

2) A pair of machine learning servers, each of them with a threadripper 3955wx, 256GB RAM and two 4090s

3) A more powerful machine learning server, with a threadripper 5975wx, 512GB RAM and two 4090s.

All of them run NixOS. They are mainly used to serve a bunch of services: hydra/nix binary cache, shiori, grafana/prometheus, paperless, syncthing, filerun, assistant etc. And also training jobs all the time.

I would highly recommend NixOS to run on your servers for the services.

Holy smokes, I'd hate to be on the receiving end of that power bill, though I'd love to have the kind of workload that justified that setup.

> I was thinking maybe some small thinkcenter or dell micro PCs + a NAS (Thinking QNAP because they are cheaper). Lower TDP would be great too. Power costs are a concern. Thinking about Nextcloud, plex, jellyfin, home assistant, local backups, etc...

My use cases are similar to yours, and I recently "upgraded" from an 8-bay QNAP NAS filled with 4TB drives (RAID 6) to a 2-bay QNAP NAS (TS-233) with very large hard drives (RAID 1). The TS-262 and TS-264 have some interesting upgrades over that base model.

I built a small business around this idea (particularly your last sentence about it evolving quickly), so I can’t not promote https://KubeSail.com and our hardware at https://pibox.io

That said, I use an old workstation as my home router and server. It’s worth the power bills in saved subscription cost alone. Much more relevant is how much of my time I spend on it!

I have a NAS built around an i3-4370 that was purpose-built with consumer hardware.

Another host built with consumer components: MiniITX with a Ryzen 2700X that was pulled from my main desktop when I upgraded. It runs most services that I actually use, including Plex which has a NFS mount to the above mentioned NAS.

3 Orange Pi 5 Plus SBCs that I recently set up for distributed application and ARM testing.

If I was starting from scratch, I'd buy a Synology Diskstation for NAS and a couple cheapo Ryzen Mini PCs.

ASRock DeskMini A300, running a Ryzen 3400G and 32 GB of RAM and hooked up to an 8 TB ZFS pool. The whole deal is hidden behind the monitor on my desk. It's running a whole pile of self-hosting stuff (Plex, Home Assistant, Seafile, Syncthing, Pi-hole, Wiki.js, Photoprism, Wireguard, Mail Piler, backups, etc) and hardly ever breaks a sweat. I also have a no-name mini PC from Aliexpress running backup DNS and VPN in the garage.

A repurposed HP Pavillion TP01-0066 Desktop w/Ryzen 3700X, 256GB NVME SSD and 32GB RAM, with 5x USB 3.0 HDD's attached for mass storage and onsite backup using dirvish[1] and rdfind[2]. It has a fan but is usually silent.

[1] https://dirvish.org/ [2] https://github.com/pauldreik/rdfind

QNAP TS-464-8G. Runs containers, media server, file system, Plex, DLNA and a hundred more things. The RAID aspect with some Seagate IronWolf drives helps me sleep better at night.

I had a 7 year old QNAP which eventually died. I was able to purchase this one and move my drives over after updating the internal software first. Nothing lost. I then one by one took out my 4TB drives and replaced with 16TB drives, then expanded the space. Everything "just worked".

I used this and built my own.

https://mitxpc.com/products/mitx-4125a

If you want to buy hardware for this and not reuse something old, Intel embedded ITX boards are the way. Chipsets J1900, J4125, N6005, or the newest N100. Cheap, low power, x86, standard PC parts, great performance (magnitudes more than SBC-s/RPi-s).

My link is to a motherboard with a J4125 processor.

HP Proliant 1U standing vertically inside a water heater cabinet! It is running Proxmox. The 10-15 services for my LAN isn't creating enough heat that I can hear it, except if the dryer is also on and it is a hot day and Plex is being used...

There's also a enterprise HP switch where I disabled the fan and it reports "temperature normal" even though it is in the same cabinet. Fibre to OPNsense in the living room.

It doesn't have to be complicated or pretty.

I’ve been running an Asustor NAS ever since I wanted to self host. Recently switched to a newer Asustor model. I’m running Homeassistant, pihole and a few node based websites on it. Also used it for a while as a media server in my house combined with a Kodi pi streamer behind my TV. But found that becoming a bit old fashioned.

Their systems were relatively cheap and perform well. Community is a bit smaller as opposed to the Synology one though.

I've been keen on a new TrueNAS Scale build very similar to the one showcased on LTT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO6DMWHK_HA

That's a full-custom build with a used AMD EPYC, Asrock Rack ROMED8-2T, and a boatload of HDDs, which fit great in a Fractal Design 7, which seems to match your desire for not-a-rack.

Epyc 7443, 256GB, 2x 1tb nvme + 2x 16TB hdd and some smaller drives, 2x 10GbE all in a 4U is living in my basement. However, that is not needed if you only want to use it for personal stuff. If you get 64GB of memory and 8-12 cores it should cover your needs more than enough. Having more than that is useful for work purposes - replicating onpremise or cloud infra and testing.

Currently running a racked qnap 4 disk nas as Synology took the integrated graphics out of their boxes. It's got jellyfin and *arr docker containers running in it.

Also have another rack server incoming, which I'm going to make into an openstack aio and run all my fun side projects on it so my wife stops complaining about me leaving my desktop on overnight

Just upgraded the CPU in my old haswell Core-i3 mediacenter box to a Xeon E3-1271v3 (cause they are now $20 on ebay). It was an i3 because i5s and i7s do not include ECC support. The i3 did and the new xeon does. Supermicro X10SLM-F mobo, 32GB ECC ram, 7x 14TB drives in a software RAID6, intel SLC 128GB SDD for rootfs, debian stable, 2.5Gbit NIC

A quite old Dell XPS 13 with the battery removed (there are youtube videos on how to do that). It's very quite, low power usage and much faster than something like a Raspberry Pi.

Only limitation is that it doesn't have ethernet ports, so I needed a USB 3 to ethernet adapter. But those exist in usb-hub form and work quite well.

I’ve got an intel nuc and a 2014/15 (not super sure) Mac mini, both running Ubuntu 20.04. Never had any issues with either, they’ve both been running Homeassistant and 15 other docker containers for a few years with no issues.

TrueNAS Scale might be worth looking at.

https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/ for a desktop or shelf sized unit, those are actually quite nice, and repairable with off the shelf hardware.

Disclaimer: I have a Mini XL+, but it's primarily storage on my office 10gbe network.

Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C3758 @ 2.20GHz 127.9GiB ECC RAM 8x WD in raidz2 1 SSD slot is a time machine pool for backing up my laptop on the network.

Scale would provide far more home server options than core. But all in all, the community is awesome, you're somewhat supporting open source and ZFS. And the big one for me is I can repair it, or swap out ALL the hardware if I want to upgrade.

3x Intel NUCs with i7 + 16GB mem, 2x Raspberry Pi 4 8GBs, 1x Synology NAS w/ 4x10TB drives

The NUCs run my HA kubernetes cluster and all the apps I run out of my home. The Pis are primarily for playing around. The NAS is my general NFS server storage which mostly gets used by my k8s cluster.

Skull Canyon NUC (Skylake, the gamery one with the literal skull on it).

Synology NAS with a bunch of 16TiB drives.

Runs basically everything I want including a gitlab instance (which is externally accessible: https://git.drk.sc )

I second Synology NAS. Although the UX of running Nextcloud in docker was awful, I defaulted to using everything Synology has to offer instead of setting up OSS apps (Synology Photos instead of Nextcloud/ Photoprism etc). I run a few small side projects with cloudflared. Low power consumption, RAM can be upgraded, storage is almost infinite... Beware the CPU. If you plan to host something serious, it will probably become a bottleneck.

I had an old thinkserver ts140, which is nice but I hardly use it anymore.

I replaced it with a raspberry pi 4, with 2 external 4Tb usb drives. Runs Plex, and handles all the backups of other machines on my network. Very low power, a little slow I guess, but works well enough for me.

Synology NAS 920+ for my photos, backups, Jellyfin, home assistant, etc. I mount it with nfs to my devices and have a raspberry pi 4 running WireGuard to connect to it when out of the house. It’s incredibly easy to maintain, which has been very nice.

I bought a new Beelink mini-PC that has an 8-core AMD CPU, 32GB memory, 1TB m.2 drive for $429. Added two 2TB SSD drives (software based RAID1). Attached a USB powered 120mm fan on top.

Running a bunch of virtual machines. Plenty of power, stays cool and takes up very little room.

Mini ITX board, Ryzen 2200G, 32GB RAM, a 1T NVMe and a 10T HDD. This one is in a Cooler Master Elite 120 case, which fits on an IKEA Kallax shelf in the cubbies.

I also have a 16GB Orange Pi 5 with a 500G NVMe running some things. It’s surprisingly powerful.

I keep 2x ~150 USD machines at home; 1 active, 1 cold spare. Current active is Dell 3020 w/ 4th gen i5-4590 3.3GHZ Quad-Core, 8 GB RAM. It has been enough for nextcloud, jellyfin, home assistant, backups. I think it averages about 30w

I have a couple of desktops with decent CPU, memory and GPU and 4x Intel NUCs that I run Proxmox on to manage VMs. I generally run a Kubernetes cluster on the VMs.

Depending on your use case, maybe just run a couple $5 machines on DigitalOcean?

I run a 486 sx with math co-processor running at 25Mhz 8 MB of RAM Windows 3.11

What storage do you have ? Do you use RAID ?

2U rack mount with AMD EPYC 7443P, 512GB of RAM, 8x12TB IronWolf Pro, 2x 960 U.2 Samsung MZQL2960HCJR for ZFS L2ARC + ZIL, 2x 256GB M.2 Samsung MZVLB256HBHQ for rootfs and 2x crappy Samsung SATA SSDs for VMs.

My old Skylake board in a really old Antec case is my NAS, a Lenovo m720q with a dual Intel 10gbe NIC is my router, and an HP EliteDesk mini with a 7th gen Intel chip (i5? Don’t recall) runs various VMs.

Synology NAS, plus a raspberry pi running Pihole. Not very exciting.

How does this work? Do you have all your network traffic traversing through the Pi to block ad traffic?

No, it’s not a firewall. It’s just a local DNS server with a list of domains that are known to be ad servers.

Used HP ProDesk 600 G3 DM 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, i5-7500T: 140€ + 2TB NVMe 80€.

Last BIOS update: December 15, 2022

Fedora Server + Docker: Nextcloud, Homeassistant, webdev, backups.

Idles at 25 Watt - 0% CPU & 1.4GB RAM.

I have a 11+ year old 12 core HPE prolient g7 with 6 ssds in a two vdev raidz1 zfs pool. The power consumption is more than if I just rented from herzner :(

SuperMicro A2SDi-16C-HLN4F mini-ITX 16xatom cores onboard, no socket

128G of RAM

AUDHEID K7 case w/ 8x 3.5" hotswap bays

This is a low power, low noise rig that still serves...

Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 16GB Xeon E31226 v3 3.3GHz 1TB HDD. Running Plex and Homeassistant for over 5 years on windows. Been great.

how are you managing data with only 1tb for plex? is there a das or nas somewhere else?

Yes nas device as well. Total 4tb. Can't fault thinkserver been rock solid even with windows

4tb? Wow you don’t watch much eh? I’m currently trying to figure out what to do bec I have one machine with esxi, 18tb that are almost full and I wanna separate it off, with data being in a NAS and OS’s/containers staying on the hypervisor. But I have no clue how to do that in a way that doesn’t end up basically wasting a few hdds or taking a very long to copy everything.

Also I don’t wanna spend another $1000, though it looks like that’s what it’ll take. Between HDDs and a new case (I already have a good enough mb,cpu,ram,psu config that I can canabalize from elsewhere). Biggest issue is finding a cheap case that has the expansion available for more drives. They just don’t make cases like that anymore and all the people near me wanna sell a full pc for 100s. I just don’t need that.

AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 6-Core @ 3800 MHz ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. TUF GAMING B450-PLUS II , Version Rev X.0x 64GB DDR4

And a bunch of HDDs, SSDs, NVMEs.

8xL5540 Dell c1100 servers each with either 96 or 192gb ram.

60TB total space with each system having two 500gb ssds for the boot disk

Rackmount NAS, 3 Intel NUCs with a rackmount adapter. Small rack in a closet.

Wyse 5070

Is VERY unlikely you need more than 1 "pc" + storage.

A mac mini + SSD enclosure is more than enough

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