My Homelab Two Years Later, Every Upgrade and What It Cost

I enjoyed your post but you went a bit overkill IMO (don't get me wrong: I know it's part of the fun).

> A Xeon E3-1226 v3 with 4 cores, 32GB of RAM, 2TB of storage.

> First it was Plex transcoding. Two people streaming at once and the quad-core Xeon started choking. Then I saw Frigate - real-time AI object detection on security camera feeds. On CPU, Frigate’s detector alone ate about 120% CPU, more than one of my four cores.

> The R730 I landed on has dual Xeon E5-2698 v4 processors. 20 cores each, so 40 cores and 80 threads in one box. That turned out to be far more CPU than I need

> I bought mine from Server Design Lab fully configured for about $1,850 each. Still a fraction of the $15,000+ sticker price new, but not the “$300 eBay special” you see in Reddit posts.

You kinda went ballistic: paying two times $1850 for used servers... You say it yourself: you now have more CPU than you need.

I simply upgraded my server's old Xeon to a Xeon with many cores: something like a Xeon E5-2683 v4 is 16 cores / 32 threads and they're basically free. And they consume less energy under load than your E5-2698 v4 (a E5-2698 v4 20 cores is a good choice too and they go for, what, $40? Less cores than that and those Xeons are basically given away now).

I literally have the "reddit special" $300 server: an HP Z440 workstation with 96 GB of ECC RAM in which I replaced the Xeon with a v4 with many cores and I paid not even $300 for the entire thing.

16 cores compared to 4 cores goes a long way.

It's always nice to read about other setups but I'd say there's a middle ground between "Xeon with only 4 cores" and 2x dual-Xeon 20 cores each for 80 cores / 160 threads total: instead of buying two $1850 servers you could have removed that old 4-cores Xeon and stuck a 14/16/18 or 20 cores Xeon in its place.

These 10 years old+ Xeons are really serious workhorses.

Whole goddamn thing written by a model. Maybe you put in the memes, maybe you didn’t, no way to know. But stuff like the night mode section is thoroughly annoying to read. Was this even proofread, or did you put an agent up to an HN point-farming task and let it rip?

It's always tempting to fiddle and expand, but my "homelab" has been my "old" Macbook Air M1 16GB on a Dell Thunderbolt Dock for many years. That thing runs about 30 containers with stuff like Paperless, Navidrome, BirdNET, SearxNG, Home Assistant, Frigate, Open-Code, arr-Stack, Nginx, Jellyfin and the like, serves as my DNS server, has about 15TB of SSD storage attached and is completely silent while using ridiculously little energy. I don't have exact figures at hand, but my whole "tech corner" power bar including router, landline phone, a hand full of IoT gateways, server, storage and an audio amp is between 40 and 55W most of the time. I do have my desktop configured as an optional and not always-on server node for Ollama, audio analysis and other high-power tasks. Even if I wanted those as always-on services, I think I would rather go for a Mac Studio than a rack setup at home and simulate some blinkenlights for the emotional aspect in a nice 3d printed case for the Mac and the storage. :D

I've started running out of RAM. I guess things tend to use more and more RAM over time. So I've started getting rid of services I don't use much. I have 6 hard disks all at the 6 year mark and a couple showing worrying SMART readings. It was fun but now with hardware prices it starts to feel like a bit of a liability. AI has drained most of the fun out of computing for me.

This encourages me to buy a node for my homelab but holy shit the prices now are very skyrocketed. Even I kinda struggle to find a new node for my homelab because most of the mini PCs or refurbished such as Optiplex and ThinkCentre are going expensive too and most of it are out of stock.

Just starting out with homelab stuff but my use case is quite narrow: I want to replace my stock isp gateway with an opnsense router/firewall. Grabbed a pro desk 600 g2 for $80 shipped, an i350 nic with 4 Ethernet ports for $30, and that should do it.

Not sure what else I would want given I don't care about media stuff. I guess maybe a box to run containers in and maybe something to self-host my dumb web apps.

man I love my minipcs. low idle power usage, highly efficient, pre-rampocolypse cheap, low space footprint. all the enterprise stuff uses so much power it's overkill a lot of time for homelabs.

yeah it's not modular like you can't replace cpu/mobo/case but the value proposition for awhile was so good you could just get a new one

That's cool, personally I would have just gotten a similarly priced mac mini or studio

Who's your internet provider? I'm about to launch my product and am seriously considering deploying it in a home lab, but I'm feeling on the fence about Google Fiber 1G out of a residential neighborhood in Austin.

Isnt plex transcoding something that is better handled by a separate device, its a very specific capability which normally nothing else across containers needs

Very nice!! Thanks for sharing!