So I’ve been doing a lot of research over the last couple weeks regarding HomeLab-ing and I have some primary projects that I’d like for the house:
Plex Server / NAS with about 8TB storage. Future project to expand to a personal storage for the family to about 16TB with RAID to ensure redundancy is available.
Minecraft Server to host an area for my family to play around in. Potential for other friends to join as well.
PiHole / VPN to do away with ads and protect the data within our household.
Some future projects:
Virtualization with Proxmox for other VMs for my playground (1-5 at a time).
Potential to do away with a SOHO router (if possible) and implement something else around the house (don’t know yet, haven’t really looked into this a lot).
I think some o…
So I’ve been doing a lot of research over the last couple weeks regarding HomeLab-ing and I have some primary projects that I’d like for the house:
Plex Server / NAS with about 8TB storage. Future project to expand to a personal storage for the family to about 16TB with RAID to ensure redundancy is available.
Minecraft Server to host an area for my family to play around in. Potential for other friends to join as well.
PiHole / VPN to do away with ads and protect the data within our household.
Some future projects:
Virtualization with Proxmox for other VMs for my playground (1-5 at a time).
Potential to do away with a SOHO router (if possible) and implement something else around the house (don’t know yet, haven’t really looked into this a lot).
I think some of the challenges I’m having is “paralysis by analysis” and I’m trying to purchase the perfect solution with expansion available. Currently, I’ve been looking at some Optiplex Towers to hold the NAS and Plex Server. As far as the Minecraft Server and PiHole / VPN, I figured any mini desktop should do the trick. I come to you all with some guidance if I’m digging too deep into which chipsets are best, RAM needed for all solutions, which HDDs are suitable for each specific project, etc. I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I want to make sure that the purchase I make is worth it. I’ve been bouncing around between eBay and Facebook Marketplace but I’ve also looked at custom building the solution. I know the price gap between custom and used hardware is big, but the biggest worry I have is expansion into bigger tasks later on. I’ll front a bigger budget if it’ll be worth it in the longer run.
Also regarding energy, something relatively low power would be idea. I definitely don’t have the budget to run a rack in the house. The computing equipment will likely be in a corner of the room.