Hello. This is my first time posting here. I’ve been listening to Level1 for quite a few years now, but I’m a little nervous to put myself out here on this forum. I currently have some aging hardware. I need to get some advice on how either utilize it or get rid of it in favor of something better. My budget isn’t too high so I need to stay as economical as possible. Let’s say for the sake of this discussion my budget is <$1000. I have the following hardware. Not all of it is in use but it is all functioning. My main concern is my NAS. I know enough about Linux to know I don’t know anything and have only scratched the service. I’m not opposed to making the switch fully. I like gaming as a casual in my free time which is what has kept me from making the leap. I would love to build something new but can’t afford it. Can I somehow manage a home lab (Plex or Jellyfin, NAS, some virtual machines for learning) with the current systems I own? Am I totally outdated and I shouldn’t bother with any of this stuff? At the very least, I need an off ramp for the NAS. Please help.
1Gb/s Internet
PFSense
Lenovo ThinkCentre M73
2x1Gb NIC
NAS
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, 2.83 GHz
RAM: 8 GB
Operating system: FreeNAS 11.1-U7
Storage: Six drives in a RAIDZ1 pool
Storage pool: approximately 10.9 TiB usable capacity
Pool status: Online, with approximately 7.11 TiB allocated and 3.77 TiB free
This cpu is almost 2 decades old and it wont really be possible to do proper homelab due to the age of the processor. it does not have an iGPU, so transcoding is out. The ram on the machine is also not going to go very far, I would say 16gb is the minimum if you want to run vms as well as run a NAS. probably also want to check on the age of the drives as I have a feeling they also might be ancient.
No need to get the latest and greatest anything, simply moving to any system made in the last 5 years would be a massive upgrade. The real biggest difference you will find is power efficiency in the cpu part. Simply getting a similar Thinkcentre from the last 5 years is likely the simplest way. Good news is that this upgrade is not going to break the bank. Once you do upgrade it will be trivial to run homelab on the machine.
The gaming machine is fine, but upgrading the motherboard and cpu to later versions will give you best bang for the buck. same as homelab no need to get the latest, anything from the last 5 years is fine. upgrading gpu or memory is going to be difficult in the current market. You could already technically run a homelab on the gaming machine, but personally I would keep the lab and game machine separate.
if you really would rather not spend money, you can turn the old laptop into a homelab, it has enough juice.
The games I’m playing are fine. I was considering moving off this gaming rig b/c of the lack of update support from MS after Oct of ‘27.
The NAS is a really old coverted desktop and the thumbdrive is starting to fail. I need to get the 7 TB transferred off of it and onto something stable.
I wonder if I ought to turn the old rig into the homelab and bite the bullet and build a gaming rig with some newer hardware. It would be expensive but it will last me quite a while. Thanks for the advice!
You could do that, but keep in mind that that machine is also rather old, I personally would update at least the motherboards for both as the CPU and MB upgrade to something that ~4 years old is going to be peanuts compared to trying to buy anything that uses DDR5.
The good thing you have is the 64gb of DDR4, you should build the upgrades around that as that is the single most valuable piece, and right after that is the 2080ti, everything else is bargain bin value on the desktops.
as for the NAS data, just get a 8tb external and dump the contents there. Then do your upgrades and keep the 8tb as a backup drive that you update every so often. Because I’m guessing you don’t actually have backups.
I was backing up to the cloud using crashplan but they stopped allowing mapped drive backups and I didn’t know how to backup right from the NAS itself.
To add to what others said, consider some budgeting towards a newer/ faster internal network.
If you go with 2.5 Gigabit ethernet in your house and don’t need any fancy features like a managed switch or POE, you can get reliable & simple PCIe cards for $20-30 each (sometimes on sale/ clearance for half that), USB 3.0/ USB C 2.5 dongle for $20-30, a multi port pretty low power switch for $50-150.
2.5gigabit is typically super easy to run on basic ethernet cables you already have, it will get you around 250MB/s transfer speeds between devices, barely use any power, plus if you upgrade your gaming rig to the right motherboard it could have 2.5gbe built in without needing a network card.
The jump to 10gbe equipment is still pretty high, but 2.5gbe is a real sweet spot for available, price and low power usage.
Laptops can be great to putz around on for some home lab stuff, or just tinkering, sometimes it makes sense to leave the battery in, other times it’s better to remove it (especially if it’s swelling up)
