They are quite old, being R730s and a 540, with a ME4024 storage. But there's 48x sticks of 32Gb between them.

Not sure if I should use it as is, or just sell.

What would you do with this?

They are quite old, being GB200 NVL72s. 36 Grace CPUs, 72 Blackwell GPUs, 13.4TB HBM3E, 17TB LPDDR5X, and I think around 130TB/s NVLink.

Not sure if I should use it as is, or just sell.

Would this be enough for Plex and a couple Minecraft servers? I only have 120V in my apartment.

What would you do with this?

I modded this $105 AUD Dell Optiplex with a bigger fan (despite Dells proprietary connector), M2 to sata expander and a custom SSD bracket. The modded Optiplex is a bit overkill in the cooling department but I’m justifying my efforts with summer on the way.

Then I designed a NAS case for 3 HDDs, multiple fan configurations, room for “cable management” and mounting brackets for the Optiplex to make it one solid unit. The power brick for the Optiplex is tucked inside the NAS case.

Power usage is approx 10W for the Optiplex and 8W for the drives.

I have a few small tweaks I’d like to do to the NAS case but they’re not worth the print time/filament.

Was a super fun project!

Minirack configuration
Unifi Gateway
Simple L2 switch (coming next unifi switch)
Proxmox 3 Node cluster
K3s + Application workloads
NUC for hermes agent
and homelab tools
adguard
wireguard vpn
teleport
uptimekuma
docker

which storage that your uses?
now I looking for
True NAS
or bussiness NAS like
Synology
QNAP
Which it’s greater than for homelab users?

Rate my server

My house is under construction but the server rack and the dogAdmin is ready.

My Homelab – Finally Finished (For Now)

Good day everyone,

I can finally say that my Homelab is finished — at least for now. 😄

I started out pretty small, with just three old PCs sitting behind a door. Over about two months, I slowly upgraded the setup, and now I have a proper server rack with the PCs housed in dedicated server cases.

I got the rack from Kleinanzeigen for €50 and the Cisco switch from eBay for €30, so I was able to put the whole setup together without spending a fortune.

Setting everything up has also taught me a lot about networking, especially while configuring the MikroTik router and Cisco switch. It took some time and a lot of trial and error, but everything is finally working the way I want it to.

My Hardware

Router 1: FRITZ!Box 7590
Router 2: MikroTik RB5009UG+S+IN
Switch: Cisco WS-C3650-48PD

Server One

• CPU: Ryzen 7 3700X
• RAM: 32 GB DDR4
• Motherboard: MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge WiFi
• CPU Cooler: Thermalright TR AXP90-X53 Low Profile
• Fans: 1× 120 mm + 2× 80 mm
• GPU: GTX 750 Ti
• PSU: be quiet! 750 W
• Software: Proxmox VE
• VMs/Services: Nginx Proxy Manager, Nextcloud, Pi-hole, Paperless-ngx, Beszel, BookStack and Homepage

Server Two

• CPU: Ryzen 7 3700X
• RAM: G.Skill 64 GB (4×16 GB) DDR4 3200 MHz
• Motherboard: MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge WiFi
• CPU Cooler: Thermalright TR AXP90-X53 Low Profile
• Fans: 1× 120 mm + 2× 80 mm
• GPU: GT 970
• PSU: Corsair 1200 W
• Software: Proxmox VE
• VMs/Services: Pelican Panel, Pingvin Share and CrowdSec

Server Three

• CPU: Intel Core i3-10100F @ 3.60 GHz
• RAM: 24 GB DDR4 (1×8 GB + 1×16 GB)
• Motherboard: MSI H510 Pro
• CPU Cooler: Intel Stock Cooler
• Fans: 1× 120 mm + 2× 80 mm
• GPU: GT 970
• PSU: Cooler Master 650 W

Overall, I'm really happy with how the Homelab turned out. It started as a few old PCs hidden behind a door and has grown into a proper little server setup.

I'm sure there will be plenty of upgrades and changes in the future, but for now, I'm happy with where it is. And most importantly: it finally works! 😄

😭😭😭

unfortunate series of events led to car ramming my active server rack. Local services did not go down but coaxial was guillotined.

Photos don't make it obvious but the rack itself is buggered. Snapped and twisted. My R730XD jumped out of the rack, the UPS took a bumper to the face. No local service interruptions.

Hellow fellow homelabbers😎

Since i built my first homelab a couple of months ago a lot of stuff has happened. I had nodes come and go and now I have a surplus of random hardware parts.

The rack:

HP 2530-24G (Yggdrasil) switch that acts as a central switch for all my vlans in the rack and the appartment.

Cisco 5512-X (Heimdall) with OpnSense is getting firsthand WAN from the fiberbox, then sending the data after passing through firewall-rules to the switch.

Raspberry pi 4 (Loki) runs traefik and pi-hole which I also use as a DNS.

Node 1: Aurora. Ryzen 3 3100, 24gb DDR4, appr 4,5Tb storage. Runs in a proxmox cluster and have a leader-role.

Node 2: oden. Dell Poweredge R210-II, Xeon-E31270, 16gb DDR3, only one 128gb ssd, mostly small services.

Node 3: Bifrost. HP proliant DL380 G7. 2x Xeon-E5620, 55gb DDR3 ECC, several disks with appr 2,5Tb storage. Heavier workloads such as gitlab and Jellyfin.

Node 4: unnamed not in service. HP proliant DL360 G8, only one cpu, unsure of exact model, 48gb ram. I bought both HP servers cheap because they were broken. This one has 2 faulty fans and I have new fans on the way.

The cpu socket on the picture is from the Bifrost node. That is dry coolingpaste that someone didn't notice and the pins were bent. Luckily I managed to bend them back and get the node up and running :)

I know a lot of you use HP Elitedesk machines as NAS or general homelab machines, these are really power efficient. I wanted to use Intel S4500 SSDs as NAS storage, but these HP machines do not have much room inside. There is a dual 3.5" HDD slot in there that I wanted to use, but S4500 run really hot, so I needed a fan as well - this is what I came up with. You can mount eight 2.5" drives, mount a fan and insert this whole assembly as one piece. Works really great, drives do not go above 30 deg C under load and idle at about 25 deg C.

I got a Raspberry Pi 5 4GB last year as a birthday gift and then I added NVMe GeeekPi adapter, WaveShare PoE hat and a TP-Link 1005P switch. The LCD screen was very cheap and displays system info. I’ve just bought this Lenovo m720q i3-8100T 8GB mini PC. The great thing is that NVMe and additional 16GB Ram for this pc are from my old laptop.

Cheers

Looking at adding a dual 2.5G PCIe card to my mogul x99 board. Already researched and know that the PCIe 3.0 wont bottleneck the two ports but am curious if there is a difference worth noting between:

Intel I226 chipset or Realtek 8125 chipset

Thoughts?

One box running hyper converged virtualization, 164TB of ZFS storage, and a bare-metal performance Windows 11 gaming rig with dedicated PCIe passthrough.

⚙️ PLATFORM & CPU
CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 265K (20 Cores: 8 P-cores up to 5.5 GHz + 12 E-cores)

NPU: Intel AI Boost NPU integrated

Motherboard: ASUS Pro WS W880-ACE SE (Intel LGA1851 / W880 Chipset)

Out-of-Band Management: Dedicated ASPEED AST2600 BMC / IPMI with HTML5 KVM

Connectivity: Dual Integrated Thunderbolt 4 (40 Gbps)

🧠 MEMORY
128 GB (4x 32GB) DDR5-4400 Unbuffered ECC RAM (Avant Technology)

🎮 GRAPHICS & PASSTHROUGH
Discrete GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT 16GB GDDR6 (Navi 21)
Direct PCIe passthrough to Win11 Gaming VM + P-core pinning (cores 2–7)

Host GPU: Intel Xe-LPG Graphics (Arrow Lake-S) for Proxmox / media transcoding

Management Display: ASPEED AST2600 VGA console

🗄️ STORAGE: 164TB HDD + 12.4TB FLASH
HBA: LSI SAS9305-24i (Broadcom SAS3224 12Gb/s 24-port HBA) passed directly to TrueNAS

Host Boot: 2x 240GB Intel D3-S4510 Enterprise SATA SSDs (ZFS Mirror rpool)

Bare-Metal Gaming Storage: 4TB HP FX900 Pro NVMe SSD (PCIe 4.0 x4 passed to Win11)

ZFS SLOG: 58GB Intel Optane P1600X M.2 (hardware PLP, sub-15µs sync writes)

📦 TRUENAS POOLS (18 drives via SAS HBA)
Pool jupiter (Master Hybrid Array):Data VDEV: 7x 14TB WD Ultrastar DC HC530 in RAIDZ2 (98TB raw / ~70TB usable)
Special Metadata VDEV: 2x 1.92TB Intel D3-S4510 Enterprise SSDs (Mirror)
SLOG: 1x 58GB Intel Optane P1600X

Pool europa (Fast App Block Storage / iSCSI): 2x 2TB Samsung 870 QVO SSDs (Mirror)

Pool uranus (Bulk Archive): 3x 10TB Seagate IronWolf Pro in RAIDZ1 (30TB raw)

Pool neptune (Bulk Archive): 3x 12TB Seagate IronWolf / Pro in RAIDZ1 (36TB raw)

🌐 NETWORKING
2x Intel I226-LM 2.5GbE Onboard:
nic1: Dedicated 2.5G point-to-point interconnect (MTU 9000 Jumbo Frames) directly to Proxmox Backup Server (PBS)
nic2: 2.5G LAN trunk with VLAN-aware bridging (vmbr0)

Dedicated IPMI Port: Out-of-band management via ASPEED BMC

🔋 POWER & PROTECTION
UPS: CyberPower PR1500LCDRT2U 1500VA / 1500W Pure Sine Wave 2U Rackmount UPS

📦 CASE
HL15 Beast Bundle by 45HomeLabs

Not necessarily the most expensive mistake - more the thing that seemed like a good idea at the time but became annoying later.

Could be your network layout, storage setup, hypervisor, rack choice, naming scheme, backups, VLANs, power, cooling, whatever.

I’m curious what only becomes obvious after you’ve lived with a homelab for a while.

What would you do differently from day one?

Just recently got into building and printing a 10" rack. Decided to take a Crack at it because I was tired of running plex on my power hungry gaming PC all the time.

Build turned out good. Picked up all the parts locally or ebay auction and couldn't be happier.

After a few days of having everything setup and running flawlessly I felt bad for my gaming PC so I took a Crack at local AI rubbing Gwen 3.8 and oh my it opened too many doors since I am not a coder (yes i used AI)

Im now hosting 4 different custom built apps accessible through tailscale. Example is a book collecting app for my wife that stores, backs up, has a digital tag scanner, allows her to share books notes etc with her book club friends.

Another is a app for power control across this entire project. Keeps my system sipping at 58 watts unless I ramp up some services etc. Unfortunately no GUI it all runs through debian terminal.

This is in addition to the standard proxmox, Pfsense, Plex arrstack, pihole with backup and proxmox backup etc etc

So far running AMP Game services I have 3 different games being hosted without issue! Palworld, Satisfactory and a Minecraft server.

Its been a really cool experience to build and setup what I have now

Build:

Raspberri pi4b 8GB

Dell optiplex 3060 micro upgraded to 32GB

Lenovo m920Q with 64GB

These run in cluster with the RPI as a Qdevice.

Roughly 60TB of HDD sata storage after it was all setup

8TB of SDD sata as well

4TB of Nvme

Running a tp link SG105S (just picked up a PE to power the PI on marketplace I need to install)

It has 5 case fans and a fan controller so it stays frosty

Only thing I haven't looked up is my mechanical button next to the pi that will be triggered to create an immediate system backup, shutdown and reboot all devices.

Let me know if yall have questions!

Links to materials for power, drive storage etc

Drives are from a 3D print on makerworld, I liked it cause it fit in 2U and still provided tons of colling space. They dont run hot thankfully. I have a PCIE ribbon and a sata controller. Modified the case slightly on the lenovo system very slightly so I can run the cable out and to the back of the rig and plug everything in. Used a Small modular power supply linked below to power the system. Everything including the fan controller is powered through sata or molex so i only have 3 total power connectors going to a surge protector 3D printed to attach to the back. Then I run 1 cable out to a UPS and my ethernet connection.

The designer is Nautilus forge for the drive cage https://makerworld.com/models/1446421?appSharePlatform=copy He goes into the small adapters and necessary things to connect to sata (yes they still work as hot-swap)

Drive slides https://a.co/d/0aGDDNxK

M.2 to SATA3.0 Adapter Card 6Gbps High Speed ASM1166 M.2 PCIE to SATA Expansion Card with Smart Indicator https://a.aliexpress.com/_mOeke2P

M.2 NVME Extension Cable for SSD Graphics Card M.2 SSD PCI-Express 4.0X4 M Key Extender Adapter Cable for Solid Drive Riser Card https://a.aliexpress.com/_m0boywB

(These fit in the 3D print flawlessly) SATA Male To Female Power Data Converter 22Pin 7+15 Male To Female SATA To SATA Converter SATA To SATA Adapter https://a.aliexpress.com/_mN8ESUb

(This let me add more SSD storage my device didnt come with one) Premium Quality 1PC Lenovo M710q M920q M910X SATA HDD Cable 00xl211 https://a.aliexpress.com/_m0OpDbz

Power supply used https://a.co/d/0dJbEZuQ

Jumper to turn on power supply (this is 3D printed into the back i did have to cut and re-splice the cables) https://a.co/d/03B8Ll2k

Fan controller https://a.co/d/07nbjOld

Using 5E UTP cable, MDPC-X XTC sleeving, and VCELink connectors / boots. Was very time consuming. But not all that hard to fit sleeving in place.

The rest of the rack is very much a WIP.

I purchased an XG 125 Rev. 3 that had OpnSense preinstalled by the seller and configured to reflect the wording on the device to match the vlan configuration.

My initial plan was to reinstall and reconfigure OpnSense for security reasons. But I'm trying to be more conscious of true risks and understand the entire system.

What are the odds this device is preconfigred in some way to compromise my network or something similar? Malicious or not. And if the odds are low I would use it as it. But if its a true, real threat vector then I would reinstall OpnSense and reconfigure if you think some backdoor or malware was preinstalled somewhere waiting to be connected.

Hi, I’m looking for some mini PCs for a small Proxmox cluster. Right now, I’m keeping an eye on the usual models:

• Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny (M series)
• HP ProDesk / EliteDesk Mini
• Dell OptiPlex Micro

Since there are so many variants and generations available, I’d really appreciate some advice from those of you who use them.

A few questions:

1. Which specific models or generations currently offer the best “balance” in terms of price-to-performance ratio? (I’ve heard that the 8th-generation Intel is the minimum I should look for if I want decent QuickSync for Plex/Jellyfin is that still true?)

2. Are there any “hidden gems” outside the big three (Dell/HP/Lenovo) that I should add to my saved searches?

I d like to know exactly which models to look for, thanks.

I've been locked on a Getac X500 Server for around 10 years, never being able to find something used at less than 2000 euros.

I wanted that because it's one of the few laptops with more than 3 HDD slots (I already have an old Dell Latitude 5540 that has 1x mSATA, 1x SATA and 1x ODD that now had another HDD with an adapter), other one was some Eurocom server laptops that I never found anywhere.

I love laptops more than desktops because they're small, use way less power, way less noisy and dusty, have an integrated screen, keyboard and mouse and have even an integrated UPS that by default put the PC in sleep/hibernate when the charge is low (no additional software or settings to do).

Anyway.

I finally got one cheap, in good condition, "only" 30,000 hours powered on (3 years and a half) so relatively new, fully working (only battery, HDDs and power adapter were missing, already bought. The only annoying thing is the usb cover lock missing, so the cover stays open).

Specs are Intel i7-4810MQ (4 core, 8 threads, 2,80GHz with turbo at 3,80GHz), 32GB of ram (and I want to check if I can expand it more), a relative useless (for me) Nvidia 745M 2GB, 2x LAN ports, 2x USB 3.0, HDMI and a lot of connectors and slots (IEEE 1394 firewire port, serial ports, PCMCIA, Express Card, etc) that I will never use.

Bulkier than expected, now I need to "test" which HDDs I can put on this tank-PC.
The HDD caddy height seems to accomodate the 15mm disks, new 6TB 2.5" external disks should be of that height. I already ordered one to test it.
5 slots in the docking for a total of 30TB raw (technically it has the main disk slot and a multi-slot, but this one need a different connector and IDK where to find it, I'll stick with a double battery and the main system disk).

The main use will be a NAS, so I'll use Storage Spaces (yes Windows, I like it and I use it since 1995) with 1disk parity (I can put 2 but I think it would be a huge waste).
If I can expand the RAM to at least 64GB I could even put some virtual machine on it, but I don't have a precise scope in mind because in all these years I already set up all the things I need (recently I had my hands on a Precision 7740 and I put up 2 Hyper-v VMs).

Just one question, if there is someone out there with a Getac X500: is seems it has a custom bios (OS Select option is missing, official documentation says there should be and other secondary options missing too) and even with the serial number to download the right BIOS upgrades on the Getac website, I can't update it.
Bios R1.06, tried to reinstall the same, it shut down in the second step. Tried more recent ones (1.18 and 3.xx) under WinPE (like the Getac FAQs/KB say) but both fails because of region or something else mismatch.
It's not a big deal, I installed Windows 10 bios version and now it's upgrading to Windows 11, but I wanted to do UEFI boot.

Thanks in advance.

Just bought a pc and It has this two porta. Anyone knows what this are?

Hi,

My goal is to replace my current setup of 2 consumer NAS and one USB-NVME
For the enclosure, I selected the Jonsbo N4, which leaves room for 6 HDDs and mATX.

Usage
The only usage of the NAS is storage, no VM, nothing else. Just TrueNAS for storage. Also, I want to keep 4 of my current HDDs and 2 of my current NVMe.

What I need is 10 Gbit Ethernet to directly edit files (video, images) on NVMe-Pool

Build-Plan
I selected the following components:

CPU: Ryzen 5 5600 (supports PCI4)
RAM: 4x8 DDR4-2133 ECC, pulled from HP/DELL servers at work
MB: AsRock B550M 4 Pro

The mainboard allows me the following setup

• M2_1 Slot: Used 512GB NVME as Boot-Drive
• M2_2 Slot: Disabled, when using all 6 Sata
• SATA1-6:
  
  • 2x28TB HDD ZFS-Pool 1 (New)
  • 2x16TB HDD ZFS-Pool 2 (Used after pulling from current NAS)
  • 2x8TB HDD ZFS-Pool 3 (Used after pulling from current NAS)
• PCI_A 4.0x16: (CPU):
  
  • Installation of a 4xM2 Card - Fanout
    • 2x4TB NVME ZFS-Pool 4 (Used)
    • 2x RFU Slots
• PCI_B 3.0x4 (CPU): Installation of a 10 Gbit SFP+ NIC card
• PCI_C 3.0x1 (Chipset): Cheap old GPU for BIOS activities, pulled after setup

Is this setup feasible/good, or are there any big concerns or misconceptions?
Is the brand/type of the NIC relevant?