Hi guys, 2025 is quite a special year to me so i want to share my story to how i spend ~6 months salary in homelab 
I gradute in late 2024 with AI&DS degree, why i chosed this major? Because my lecturer said I could make a lot of money with it :))
Here is the English translation of the chat:
→ This is Nguyễn Minh Hiếu speaking.
→ What did you ask, sir?
→ I suggest Hiếu switch his direction to studying AI so it won’t be a waste.
So that is why my major is AI&DS, but you never know what life will throw at you
So by accident i already post without finished the story, here we go!
By late 2024 I’m basically unemployed cause no where hire inexperienced AI&DS bachelor, so I’m applied for any job related to IT, and luckiky my first and current job is devops. From not knowing what proxy is to deploy everything HA in enterprise make me want to build my own homelab enviroment :))
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This is my first “linux” pc, It is a dell 3060 micro with i5 8500t/8/256 which i bought for about $120 in March 2025. And yes, this is how I fell into the homelab rabbit hole.
Install proxmox in this machine, I’ve learned so much from container, virtualization. And when the time come i want everything HA for redundancy.
So the next thing I want to buy is a beefy for nas, so i built a i5 13500 with z790 + 128gb ddr4 (I got some very cheap like $50 for 32gb) and my journey to pirate sea begin
After tinkering enough with the arr stack, I decided to create a proxmox cluster just for k8s, and then I i see some deal on FB: Lenovo p330 tiny i7 8700 16/256 for $200 each. That night, I took out a loan and bought three tiny PCs to dedicate to the lab :)) (I’m tinkering with vpro)
As I said, back in August I got some pretty good deals with ram and have total of 256gb tridentz 32gb bus 3600.
I only need 128gb at that time cause that is the maximum ram my mobo can support, but the deals was so good and i bought it all. Lucky for me the ram price was double in October and i sold 128gb for the price of 256gb. So basically i got 128gb for FREE :))
- The More You Buy, The More You Save - Jensen Huang
It’s 2 a.m now and I’m very sleepy. If anyone interest I’ll continue tomorrow about how I end up with intel base ddr5 ecc nas in December where the ram price was OMG!
In November, when i learned deeply in ZFS, ECC ram is quite recommended so I plan to upgrade my NAS to use ECC. My plan is recyle as much as possible for saving so i decided to sell only 128gb of ram and my z790 motherboard.
At the time this Nas was built, I didn’t event know about ipmi so when rebuilt i want some remote management. With my old chip (i5 13500) so my option narrowed to W680 and I end up with ASUS W680M ACE SE and 64gb DDR5 ECC Udimm 2nd
So why I’m writing this? Mostly to put a milestone in my homelab journey. When I look back to ‘unemployed me’ I see myself have grown a lot. Right now my target is to update network in my house and learn more about networking. And as I said I already have Plex and I want my parents and everyone who can access to my plex can enjoy movie without language barrier. So if I have something (Like a giveaway R9700) I could really have sometime tickering with AI. My plan if I have a >= 24gb vram GPU is:
- Make my plex server movie/tv shows more accessible with non-english people
- I really like music (that why i paid for plexamp) so i want to create some tool/framework for music organizing and recommendation. I could use the gpu to extracting feature from each song and after some algorithm to create the song for the user who most likely want to hear
*I will not post my project about music here because dummy I am exposing my api key
That all, thanks you if anyone read this far. 2025 is quite a year for me after I graduating and have to stand on my own feet. Hope you stay strong and happy Christmas!
