Home Server Hardware Round-Up

48 thoughts on “Home Server Hardware Round-Up”

• All those small form factors are great and all, but how are you supposed to attach a bunch of HDDs?

• What the F compute does Wendel need 42U racks for??? 😮😅😅

• Why do we need so many Ethernet access

• Running my home server with ECC Ram & raid controller & GPU passthrough on AMD 4750G platform. It's amazing.
  Way better than those enterprise antiques I've been worked with.

• i use a asrock j5040-itx it is great for simple stuff. i use one as my daily work and surf pc. it is a passive cooled intel silver cpu wit a tdp of 10 watts and it is dead silent. official it supports only 8gb of ram but i run it with 16gb. is it slow yea but you are not really noticing it on dally stuff. i have two of them the other is a server. i run on it a minecraft vanilla server with standard settings and a factorio server simultaneously, on the minecraft server are constantly 1 to 5 players on the factorio 1 to 2 and no one know it is a 10W cpu involved no hitches no hiccups. it also runs 16gb of ram.
  my gaming pc is more powerfull but it uses in idle 80W and full blast 500W and the j5040 in idle 3W and full blast 12W. but this is only achievable because i run it on a 25W 12v powerbrick from a external HDD and uses internally a Pico PSU 80W that pas through the 12v and provides 5v and 3.3v for the mainbord. so the powerbricks efficiency is higher as a standard ATX power supply at this low power output and produces less heat. i have tryed a normal atx and it worked but the idle power was 7W and 20W full blast.
  i love this bord. i also have a bord with a N100M the single core performance was 30% faster but it has only one RAM channel and this redjuses the overall performance below the j5040 on programs that uses the RAM heavy like Factorio and minecraft but at daily use you noticed it not at all. i think it could be better as the j5040 but for my use case the j5040 is more suitable. i had tried a amd Athlon but it was to expensive for the nearly same power like the j5040 if you want be completely silent also the energy consumption is much higher because the x470 chipset alone uses 4w. and i dont need much for my type of server i only need one a sata3 port for a ssd and a pcie 2.0 x1 slot for my ipmi card and dual channel RAM and the whole thing need to be power efficient.

• UPDATE: ECC support for W680 chipset: Only on the i5 12500 and upwards in the product stack, same with 13th gen.

• I used one of those M.2 to 2.5G adapters in my Thread ripper server (Zen+ so i has 3x NVMe slots on board) With you taking about the cable that connects the RJ45 port to the M.2 card not being ideal when it comes to signal integrity i got around that by building my own connector cable using CAT6 Ethernet cable and using punch down IDC connectors (similar to ribbon cable connectors used for series ports) that way the twitted pair remains mostly un-broken. sure its not as good as having it soldered direct the M.2 device but far better than the one they provide

• I have a Nuc 9 pro and love it. Would you say that the NUC 9 Pro is still relevant for a home lab? They're dropping in price and I was thinking of going HA in proxmox with 3 of these. However, Lenovo came out with the Thinkstation p360 Ultra and you can get a similar size unit with a 12900 or 13900 with 128 gb ram. Should I wait till the price drops on the ultras or go with NUC?

• I used to have home servers more than a decade ago. Over the years a 3U rack, a 1U rack, and an 8-bay tower. But I found them just to become too cumbersome as technology improved and drive storage size increased. Now I keep all of my data on large drives in my main computer, which is an i7-6950X 10C 20T, ASUS ROG X99, 64GB, RTX-2080, and which is on all day long, negating the need for a dedicated server. The large number of SATA ports on the X99 platform really helps to support all of the drives I require. I also keep multiple copies of everything, 7 copies of my data on 7 different media, with two Cloud copies. I have seven computers in my home business, a 48TB 4-bay NAS for backup copies of every computer, and a remote VPN accessed NAS for a second cloud backup of all of my important data (first cloud backup is a Google Cloud subscription). My systems also include an AMD R9-5950X 16C 32T, ASUS ROG X570, 128GB DDR4, ASUS TUF RTX-3080, and a new workstation Intel W7-2495X 24C 48T, ASUS Pro W790 ACE, 512GB DDR5, ASUS ROG STRIX RTX-3090 24GB. I am running 2.5Gbe on all of the main gear and NAS.

• 3:52 — Yes, dual NICs to ease the glidepath to virtualization.
  Great video 👍
  Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.

• I have a 12400F + 3060. No other PC right now. Can I use this as both a server and my main PC simultaneously?

• at 16:33, If that is an Intel X550-T2 then it should do 2.5GbE and 5Gbe. the older X540 NIC's only do 1Gbe and 10Gbe. Excellent Video BTW.

• Thank you very much Sir. Question: Could i use my Ryzen 5800X ? I want to upgrade to AM5/X3D so the CPU cpild be used for a Linux Home Server

• I already own a bunch of x99 boards with XEON E5 v4 CPU's in them. The one I' measered: XEON E5 2667 v4, 64 GB RAM, 550 W bquiet! Pure Power -> 56W at idle. Selling them and buying and buying a AM4 platform would save power, yes. But I'd have to run the platform for 6 to 8 YEARS, just to recuperate the price delta between those two platforms. I'm living in Switzerland, electricity prices here aren't cheap. Meanwhile, I'm giving up a bunch of PCIe lanes. On the other hand, I' currently have no IPMI and no built-in VGA. If I need physical access, I need to pop the lid and, attach a GPU temporarily. Never mind the time I have to sink into the migration. Even if you start from scratch and buy the AM4 platform new, you can build an equivalent system on x99 for half the price. I'm not really convinced the AM4 platform is yet in that sweet spot. At least for me.

• SUBMERGE

• I have bought an Dell Optiplex 3060 with i5 8500, 8gb mem and m2 250gb and a fresh proxmox Install ist idleing at around 10-12W

• do a video on home server for under $150

• i wanna build an arm server, does anyone know any 1u boards that are itx?

• My old synology NAS (single drive, 1G ether, Linux so more than just NAS) idles under 10w and peaks at 20-25w, the 1G ether is more than enough to saturate the WD-red spinning disk.

• Well it may not be energy efficient, I don't feel like my $150 1920x locked at 4.2 GHz is really holding me back… 🙂 It seems like an adequate home server, especially with a 4 GB SSD RAID boot drive running off one PCIe slot and 128 GB of memory on a $179 ASRock TaiChi X399 MB. While single core speeds are slower, I feel like having 12 separate cores and 24 threads offers an advantage when running it as a server vs an I3-12100 or even i3-13100.

• I run my old 6700k machine as a home server and couldn't be happier with it. I found that running all my services as Docker containers vs VMs was much less overhead and the machine is cool, quiet and fairly sippy on the wattage. It's running about 20 different services including Plex without breaking a sweat. I'll upgrade….eventually.

• Would like to hear your thoughts on my server build. after watching a lot of your videos this is what i came up with, please let me know where i went wrong. Software is Truenas core,Case is a SilverStone Case Storage Series SST-CS380, Power supply Cooler Master V650 SFX Gold, Asus z590-e gaming wifi, Intel i5 11400, 64gb memory running 3200mhz CL16, 2 acer mvme 256gb setup mirrored for metadata, 2 TeamGroup 256gb setup as mirrored log files, and one intel Optane 16gb as arc2 cache on a pcie card slot 2, controller card LSI OEM 9207-8i in slot 1, Passive cooled Video card slot 3 ( to boot the system intel 11400 build in graphics will not allow you to turn CSM on in bios without a separate video card installed),WD Green 110gb ssd for a boot drive. 6 WD red 2tb drives as one vdeb with another 2 WD Red 4tb drives as another. icy Dock MB324SP-B 4 drive bay, not sure how i will use this yet. (I want to setup TeamSpeak 3 on on SSD but unsure how to do that, a walkthrough video on that would be good) mostly used for file storage (Photographer Photo storage) Most parts were bought based on performance/price. I am getting a steady 90mbps download on 1gb network but plan to update the network to 2.5g just need switches, (all the cables are cat6 or cat7 at present) could you please let me know where i could improve this for best speed? Thanks for your time.

• Seeing some of the kit in here, it makes me think that one can have a home server without error correcting ram.

• More of that horrible background "music!"

• …OR you can use USB3 2.5Gbit network dongle.

• I’ve never had any problem with external storage or 10g nics over thunderbolt with VMware esxi just shows up as a pcie device.

• Can it run a minecraft server?

• I've been running Intel NUC 12th Gen i7 with 64GB Ram + Mirrored Raid.
  Previously i was using refurbished Office PC which was using 3x more electricity while idle compared to current NUC.
  I am absolutely happy with my current system.

• I recommend you guys Wolfgang channel and especially one of his last videos where he explains how to get your idle consumption to single digits

• I recommend doing some tests on Rocket lake CPUs. Ive managed to put together a homelab for about $400 but its i7 and 32 gig of ram. Add a small SSD and an efficient psu and its idling at 16-17W off the wall. I get that its more expensive than the optiplex but considering the lower power draw you will get your money back in a year.

• Hey where can I find cheap 2.5gb or 10gb nic for pci 3 x1 slot and or pci3 x4 and above slot and or usb 3 or c variety?? That works with server os software, also need a cheap 2.5gb switch and or 10 gb

• I would like to see idle power benchmarks for alder lake vs old xeons. Maybe x79 or x99 platform systems. Those Chinese boards for those old platforms have become popular home NAS plex servers. I'd also like to see x265 benchmarks on those. My server is either transcoding a bluray rip in handbrake, streaming my plex library or sitting idle. I'm simple, but I do want to know what the power savings are actually like.

• Hey Wendell! Have heard about your channel but have really dived into some videos recently as I'm on my homelab journey. Currently repurposing some mini-ITX machines into streaming vgpu machines and this video was a godsend. It makes sense but never guessed there would be M.2 form factor intel chipset NICs. Just picked one up and just want to say appreciate all your videos! 🙂

• a while ago I bought a relatively cheap Fujitsu Esprimo Q556 with 4 Core/8 Threads and upgraded to 512GB SSD and 16GB RAM. Proxmox Idle (2 Container, 1 VM) at around 14-16W.
  Small but great start into a homelab that does not need a lot of power (rip energy prices).

• Not just the electricity concerns anymore, the old enterprise equipment is just that.. old. I've run into situations where even though I had all the cores in the world a 4790k smokes them in actual performance. I run actual enterprise testing and apps at home and I got to a point where my Dell 610's are off completely, it just wasn't worth fighting them anymore.

• I still run a dell r710

• Isn'y all DDR5 ECC?

• I just built a mini ITX box with a Intel Core i5-12400, 32GB DDR5 RAM and five 14TB WD Red. Running SCALE-22.02.3 on it now (learning TrueNAS), but the 2.5 onboard is not cutting it on throughput (about 70MB/s copy). When I tossed in a 10Gbe it got weird. Sees it…even gets an IP, but can no longer access the GUI unless I go through the onboard.

• In using an old PowerEdge R210 II as my router with a quad 2.5G nic. 1 2.5g goes to modem and the other 3 go to my switch. Yeah it's older and less efficient hardware but it was super cheap up front

• I recently bought a Mac Mini M1 16GB ram for a server for £600 second hand. I run Github Actions on it for continuous integration, it is my media server, it runs my Ansible stuff and it's super quiet and power efficient. It is connected to a small USB hub with 4 x SATA to USB adapters going to 2TB SSDs (8TB total at 500MB/sec on a budget) – all mounted under my standing desk and completely invisible. Something to consider!

• cant understand a word..

• Your uh engineers uh in their rush, uh were so preoccupied with uh whether or not they could fit Ethernet into m2 that they didn't stop to think if they should.

• what about the laptop mainboard? pull the wifi modules out of them and put in the nic module… low power 5 in on the case. yeah the power supply will be tricky but probably no worse than some of the other options

• I tired to find the video on the open air system you talked about but couldn't, anyone have a link to it?

• I'm going to counter-signal you on running ECC for non-xeon processors on older intel generations. Definitely doesn't work for HP's "off-enterprise" workstation boards in the Haswell generation, and I've used a xeon on the same board so know there's nothing wrong with the setup otherwise. Makes for an unfortunate limitation because hardly any of the Xeons include an IGP, which means you need to give up at least a lane of PCIe for graphics.

  This is all being limited based on a configuration bit, the hardware is of course the same. Intel didn't make a completely separate run of xeons with 72bit memory controllers while leaving the normal boards behind, but it seems they've been manipulating board vendors into disabling the full function if the "wrong" cpu is installed.

• my trusty dell t320 has been nothing but great to me.

• Wendel: "Cast off enterprise hardware"
  Me: So, like the 3 T420s that I got from work?
  Wendel: "Heres an Optiplex 3040 SFF"
  Me: 🙃

• Ive been reading that if you update the X550-T2 via windows, it does support 2.5 gbaset and 5gbaset

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