Hello all!
I am currently planning out my first homelab and I have been having an immense amount of trouble finding the right configuration for my first home server. I have been bouncing back and forth between platforms and I just feel nervous about making the wrong choices.
My needs really aren’t so crazy, the main purpose of this server will be NAS, and so I will likely put a good bit of the budget into storage. Though, I would also love to run some docker containers here and there for things like Jellyfin, Pi-hole, and Home Assistant. I also would be running some other random Linux VMs, but nothing too critical.
The only three things I really care about otherwise are decent hardware transcoding, power efficiency, and support for ECC memory.
I am considering picking up an older Kaby Lake i3 7100 or maybe a newer i3 10100 and going from there, as the base system would be rather inexpensive this way. But part of me also wonders if I should step up to something with 6 cores. Or maybe there is another option all together that is better?
Used prices:
Dell T320 - $150
500gb to 1tb enterprise ssd - $50
4x 10tb sas drives - $100 each
Makes a very capable little server for pretty cheap. If you don’t get the ideal cpu or ram amount neither of those cost much. Can even make it really quiet with a Noctua fan. A second SSD for OS and VMs to mirror the first would be better. An icydock 4x 2.5in drive cage to 5.25 bay is really nice. For the t320 im assuming 8x 3.5in hot swap bays and like a H310 HBA. Anyways you can reasonably get started for $600 including storage. Can share more ab9ut configuration if you want to go this route. This is basic my secondary server behind my T440.