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?
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Posted a lot of deals on r/hwdeals
Bought the Ryzen 5600U MomentPlus but it hasn’t arrived yet unfortunately :(
Bought 18 TB Storage from Best Buy, which was great but I’m not even utilizing 2% of the storage at the moment.
Didn’t get anything for the homelab, didn’t see anything I needed/wanted that I’d consider a good deal :(
Did get a weather station though (Ecowitt Wittboy), which I suppose is partly running ON the homelab, lol. So I suppose maybe that.
Half of the useful stuff I do with my homelab is home automation/home services so I’d say it counts!
Upgraded the router that firewalls all of my stuff from the other adults in the house, and the replaced router (gl.inet Mango) is now free for various shenanigans.
Bought a pack of 8266 boards with various led and breadboard accessories to play with, and an air quality sensor that will hopefully end up sending data over the home automation vlan.
Spent enough on cloud storage to get the ‘3’ of my 1-2-3 backups done for all of my photos and videos, not automated yet but that is on the list, plus picked up a few very inexpensive usb storage drives for friends.
Also bought a heart rate sensor for cardio training, and keep thinking of ways to sniff data off of it for analysis, though that’s probably not the greatest idea…
I got an open rack and some accessories 😆😆
5 x 1TiB nvme drives and USBC enclosures for a pi cluster.
Does a pi4 do that much better with nvme over usb than a sata ssd over usb (what I use)? All my high performance storage is in x86 boxes now because I only have gigabit networking so the speed advantage of nvme is really useful for local storage.
No I don’t think I can fully utilize the nvme capability. I am sure the bandwith of the controller will be a bottle neck. I got them because they were dirt cheap at my local pc shop, along with horrendous RGB enclosures to make em that much faster. SSD to me, would have accomplished the same thing.
I run the OS off USB, these will be be be used for micro_ceph.
1.5TB Optane SSD. Now I get to figure out U.2 & how to mount it in my case that has-5 drive mounts currently free.
28x 18TB HDDs from Server Part Deals for my backup NAS. Going to put them in 3x 9-drive Z2 vdevs with 1 hot spare. When they go on sale again, I’ll probably snag another 20 to fill my array.
Grabbed me some Zigbee sensors, going to try and roll my own alarm system using Alarmo in Home Assistant. Having some trouble making HA externally accessible with NGINX and Let’s Encrypt but think I am on the right track.
Picked up a pair of hdmi of Ethernet extenders from mono price. Not entirely sure what I’m going to do with them but I’m thinking trying to pipe the security feeds up to my main tv on an unused input.
I’ve been wanting to experiment with these for awhile. You should make an update post when you set them up.
I will try to post some sort of update if I do anything cool with them.
If your a youtube watcher Linus from linus tech tips has done a ton with “remote” computing and using various technologies to remove the actual PC from the room the screen is in. He has his positives and negatives but some of the stuff he does really pushes the bounds of whats possible in the consumer space.
I want to use it to send a video feed from a security camera NVR to some more televisions without having to use the buggy software they include. Thanks for the suggestion
I got 2x1000v/800w USPs for $145.
Some light strips to put in TM server rack for $9
A 24port patch panel and keystone Jacks for $35
A keyboard drawer for $50
And a rack mounted Fan for $100.
My 2024 New Years resolution is to make my server rack not look like a piece of shit.
I only lost $100 last weekend. I realized recently that the NVMe that I thought was in my server was actually a 2.5” SSD. Not sure how I forgot about that…. Then I upped my Ram from 16 to 32 (maxed out) to allow room for additional VMs.
Got myself NVME SSD read cache for my DS918+. Hoping to improve speed when browsing media libraries in apps like Jellyfin.
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 $80 back 😂
Aren’t drive hibernating if you don’t use them?
Anyway At worse it’s 20$ per month if you pay .38 kW/h. 😅
Oh boy here we go for me :
- 8x ESP32
- 50 feet of LED
- a crate of electrical hardware to power up everything.
- a mini EliteDesk to replace my RetroPi with something with a bit more power.
- I have to Install that dual 10gb card in my server.
- I still have to finish my Watercooled GPU with an disconnect-able external radiator in his own case (I think I need another D5 pump… Damnit and more piping…)
I won’t talk about everything else I need to do haha.
Hah, I got the same one as you. Got both a 2U and 4U.
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.