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?
You should be able to find a used consumer tower with something better than an i3 10100 in your budget if you let go of ECC.
Don’t worry too much about making wrong choices. You will eventually find yourself wanting to build a whole system from scratch no matter what choices you make now.
Do you already have experience with docker and some of the software you want to run? If not, I’d recommend starting there on whatever the cheapest system you can find. Unraid and TrueNAS make a lot of choices for you and can provide a gentler learning curve than proxmox or other hypervisors.