Recently upgraded my homelab, I was previously using an old Fujitsu TX1330 m1 but it was pretty loud, only had 2.5 drive bays and was pretty inefficient.
So I designed and built this custom ultra compact server chassis based around using Lenovo M720q/M920q as serevers (banana for scale). The bottom section houses an matx motherboard for use as a storage server. I picked up a dell precision 3630 workstation cheap of eBay and gutted it for parts as it doesn't use proprietary junk and it worked out less than half the price of buying individual parts.
The chassis's outer panel are printed in matte PLA with ASA internals and was all designed in fusion 360. It has 1 120mm fan on the back for the drives and another for the Lenovos to help with air flow. It also has another 92mm fan in the bottom at the front to help cool the 10gig nic
The storage server is connected to the 4 drives in the front as well as well as 2 ssds in the back and is running truenas. I use it to provide iscsi disks to the Lenovo VM hosts as well as some shares for the rest of my network. It also runs some apps that I use (tailscale, pihole & gitea). The specs of the storage server are:
Intel i5 8500 CPU 16gb ecc unbuffered ram 64gb nvme 10gic nic Sas 9211 hba flashed to IT mode 4x 3tb sas drives 2x 480gb sata ssds 200w flex atx PSU
Currently I have 2 of the 3 Lenovo nodes populated, both are running proxmoxx and they run vms that as dev and test environments for various software development projects. Both Lenovos have the following spec:
Intel i5 8400T CPU 32gb ram 512gb nvme Dual 2.5gbe nic
Everything connects to the little 2.5gbe switch that's currently sat on top. Currently had it running for about 2 weeks without any issues. I've also designed an alternative layout that has 8 drives and 6 nodes but realistically I've got no need for that at the moment.
UPDATE: As promised the 3D files and STL files are available for anyone that wants them. I will at some point add an updated version that is easier to assemble and takes a regular matx I/O Panel as well as the version with more disks and nodes.
3D Model & STL Files
