What did you all waste money on for your homelabs this holiday discount season? I snagged a rosewill 4u case for $80 on Newegg. Currently my NAS is a guest in a ryzen based proxmox host in a silverstone case with a ton of 3.5 bays. Gonna move an older supermicro server mobo into that silverstone case and make it a dedicated bare metal NAS that I’ll probably only run a few hours a month, and then build a “new” game/vm server with the ryzen parts in the rosewill case. That way I can run my more demanding stuff without also having to power a bunch of spinning rust all the time. Yes the ~70 watts for 24/7 HDD’s nags at me that much; don’t try to tell me how long it will take me to make my $80 back 😂
What projects did y’all find for yourselves?
I’ve been running proxmox on a repurposed HP thin client with separate vms for TrueNAS, Jellyfin and an arr suite. It’s been running great but I’ve run out of storage space and every time I try to jury rig a serious expansion I run into more issues and no time to solve them. So, I’ve been planning on building a new home server to take over the HPs duties and offer more headroom for new projects to play around with. I spent the weekend adding and removing various parts from my shopping cart. I went from 12th gen intel to 5000 series Ryzen to upgrading my gaming rig and relegating its parts to server duty. Ultimately, I threw all the roll my own plans out the window and bought a commercial produced NAS.
It was between a Asustor Nimbustor 2 at regular pricing and a Terramaster T6-423 at cyber Monday pricing. I decided to give the T6 a try. Primary concerns were software deficiencies, which can be mitigated by running an alternative OS. So current plan is to get the NAS up and running with TrueNAS Scale and maybe offload Jellyfin or arr suite to the NAS. Now I just need time to run over to microcenter and pick up the ram and os drive.
TrueNAS is how I got my homelab start! What’s great is once you creat your zfs pool it’s pretty portable. Over the years I went from FreeNAS to Truenas Core to Truenas Scale and then back to Core but now as a VM. Never had any problems with migrating.