Building My ULTIMATE, All-inOne, HomeLab Server

Sorry about the mistake by saying 5.25" drives! While researching and testing, I was trying to figure out how many drives I could fit in the Corsair's 5.25" bays and somehow that got into my script. 🤦‍♂ In the spirit of mixing things up, let me know what you've mixed up before!

I, also, hate using 5.25" hard drives. Such a pain ;)

Hey Tim, I’m hard of hearing, but I just want to say thank you for your time and effort into adding subtitle😊

Great video. Some of your inflections remind me of LGR. I was chuckling.

4:40: x16 will only run as x8 and x8 runs as x4 if you are using a feature that shares the same lane, x16 and NVMe Gen4 slot for example. It's important to know your mobo limitations like how many PCIe and which features shares the same lanes.

I went bear metal on my home lab server for a while, because it could do everything I wanted. However, things changed and now I’ve reinstalled everything on proxmox. The overhead is low and you have the flexibility anything in the future. So I would just install a hyper visor of you’re choosing.

I moved to a single giant server build a while back from my own giant rack with dell power edge servers. But it was to much power usage. For most use cases in a single server build. I found unraid to be the best base OS for me. 5 years later. Still rock solid and never had any major issues. Kind of on autopilot and it just works.

Don’t go with the EVO 870’s, I made the same mistake (They are consumer drives and wear out quickly!) I replaced all of them with the Samsung SM883’s (ZFS pool)

Your public library might have a 3D printer if you don't want to purchase one. I use my library's printer often.

I’ve run for years an unRaid server which had a w10 VM with GPU and NVME passthrough that I used for playing games and the rest of the system was used for docker stuff: Plex, arr suite, homeassistant and a large etc. Just make sure you have a Renesas chip based USB PCIe card passed to the VM so you can plug and unplug peripherals without freezing the VM.

200 Watt idle. Where I live (Netherlands) that's about 500€/year.

Same here. 😁👍 Taking a play from my corporate sys admin world. Separate storage and compute boxes. Going to build a TrueNAS Scale box as the central storage for the entire homelab. Then use the 2nd unRAID lic to build a fresh compute server. Both will have 10Gbe until i can swap for fiber.

15:18 When racking servers by myself, I've found that there's usually holes in both the sliding part of the rail in the rack, and the stationary part of the rail (the portion that attaches to the rack itself). Every rail is different, so it always takes some experimentation, but I've found that I can put a spare screw/toothpick/pointy-thing through both holes so that sliding part of the rail doesn't push back while I get things lined up. I do this for both sides but sticking out different amounts so I can line things up one side at a time. Just be sure that the holes you pick in the rail can be reached from the front of the rack.

"I want a machine that does everything" 1 minute later "I already have a NAS" :P To say something more productive: I prefer buying used enterprise drives because their TBW rating is vastly higher. Even compared to high end consumer SSDs it is often between 3 to 9 times higher. And it gets so much worse if you compare against QLC drives. Considering things like write amplification and RAID you can run through a lot more written data than you expect. That is probably a trade-off you made intentionally, considering you have a separate NAS that can serve as a backup target, but it is something to keep in mind for others attempting to replicate it.

Proxmox or xcpng are what I'd go with. It's nice to not have projects competing for ports or service configs.

Remember folks the ultimate homelab server for you is the first one that gets you into the hobby! You can always upgrade use what you have and upgrades over time are part of the hobby you don't need to jump to the highest end!

For an ultimate all-in-one homelab server, a hypervisor whiteout even thinking. One solution (nearly) fits all.

Proxmox for the win! No reason why, I just love it.

Also, thanks for the info on the Sliger cases. You just made me spend more money, they look great and are made in the USA for a reasonable price. My Threadripper platform is getting a new home. :)

5 1/4 DRIVES?? They're 3.5 inch!