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A home lab is never “finished”, there are always new upgrades to make, new services to install and tinker with, and new operating systems to try. It’s an ongoing experiment that usually starts as an old PC and can quickly turn into a sprawl of cables and devices, all of which have a purpose. Some of the biggest upgrades will obviously be flashy: a new router, new CPU for your build, or the addition of a dedicated GPU, but honestly, some of the best changes I’ve made have been small, relatively quiet upgrades.

ECC Memory

A small bump in capacity, but a huge increase in reliability

When I was first setting up my home lab, I had no use for anything over the 16 GB my machine already had, so RAM was last thing on my mind in terms of an upgrade. Once I started setting up ZFS storage pools and began to transfer over my important data to it, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get the most out of ZFS without a memory upgrade. With normal, non-ECC memory, ZFS can’t guarantee end-to-end integrity when transferring files and reading them, and it relies on the assumption that what’s stored in RAM is valid when it verifies file checksums.

I hadn’t noticed any kind of data corruption, but in order to ensure the integrity of my data, ECC memory was a no-brainer in this instance. Even though it required a platform change, I can be confident that every bit is where it should be. It’s not a glamorous upgrade, but it made sense.

Managed switch

VLANs don’t have to be complicated

I needed some more Ethernet ports for my network, and while my knee-jerk feeling was to buy an unmanaged switch with a handful of ports just as a quick band-aid fix, as I live in a small condo and space is already at a premium. I picked up a managed switch instead, but not on purpose. I really only bought it because it was on sale, but its manageability ended up being a lifesaver later on.

Once I started adding more and more devices to my network, I wanted a way to completely separate them from the rest of my network, and having a managed switch gave me a really easy way to get that done. It would’ve been possible to do it through my ISP’s router, but I wouldn’t have nearly as much control as I do now. I’ve given my Proxmox cluster its own VLAN, my IoT devices are completely separate, and my main network remains as simple as it was before.

UPS

A must-have quiet upgrade

There’s never a good time for a power outage, and honestly, after having a bit of a scare a few years ago that caused some data loss, getting a UPS was a top priority of mine. Even though power outages would be exceedingly unlikely in my current living situation, an uninterruptible power supply was a great investment. The one I purchased didn’t have this capability, but a network-aware UPS would be the next logical upgrade. Having a UPS that can communicate over Ethernet can be a huge game-changer.

Raspberry Pi

A swiss army knife

The Raspberry Pi 4B is barely larger than a credit card.

If there’s a single piece of hardware that’s earned its keep a hundred times over in my home lab, it’s the Raspberry Pi. I use mine as a DNS sinkhole with Pi-hole, a WireGuard endpoint, and a Grafana node for monitoring uptime across my servers. It sips power and takes up so little space, I can just forget it’s there.

A dedicated rack

Consolidating is key

The start of my home lab was an absolute mess. It took over a whole closet and was just a mishmash of devices and cables, all strewn about with no real care. It worked, which is what mattered to me, but my fiancée was quickly on my case to tidy things up.

A dedicated rack went a long way to consolidating all the different parts of my home lab. My main Proxmox node is still in a standard ATX PC case, but the rest of gear is mounted neatly, which makes everything a lot easier on the eyes, in addition to being simpler to work on.

The quiet upgrades add up quickly

None of these upgrades will meaningfully increase the performance of any task you plan on doing, but they go a long way to ensuring the other loose ends of your home lab don’t come back to bite you. Instead of a shambles of devices, cables, and services, having a finely tuned home lab can turn the experience from something that feels like a chore into something fun to tinker with.