Homelab Hardware Selection - TrueNas Scale, pfSense, VMs and More!

Hardware
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Howdy All,

I am in the process of starting a home-lab. What sparked this was my wife asked me to start backing up all our children’s photos and videos from our phones. What started as a no problem turned into a monster. My wife has 3 Iphones 256GB each worth of photos and videos over the years and I have some as well. Most of this now is pictures of our children and videos, something she wants to keep forever.

Well that turned into, “Hey can we figure out a way to backup all my family’s photos and videos as well?”. This has complicated things.

SO, my solution was I need some NAS(TrueNas Scale) of some kind. But if I am going to shell out for NAS, I also wouldn’t mind having something I can run some VMs on or Dedicated Servers for games, Plex/JellyFin, firewall, all that stuff. So I wanted to try to get something that can handle all that.

Now normally you start with some old hardware lying around and build up. I do not have that option as all my old hardware has gone to my dad so he can play games and do some VR. He is rocking my old 5600x and a 1080ti and loving it. SO my next thought was to try and find some cheap ewaste or old computers off facebook or kijiji or craiglist or something to that effect. Well let me tell yea, being in Canada and not in a major city like Vancouver or Toronto, my options and limited, and people want crazy amounts of money for basically ewaste. I checked Walmart, Staples, Costco, Bestbuy, and basically, refurbished old computers with an I5-6500 and 8gb of Ram and a 256SSD they want like 250-350 CAD for and it only goes up from there for anything more modern. I looked at trying to buy cheap old parts, a Ryzen 3600 here, or a x470 motherboard there, again, people are wanting some crazy prices. Trying to build everything brand new is also ridiculously expensive, shitty motherboard, 5700x, 64gb of ram, case, power supply, then storage drives, we are talking like 1500+ CAD.

My next adventure was Ebay…

What I have found SO FAR to be my cheapest option is to buy OLD enterprise servers and slap some HDDS in them and call it a day.

Here is an Example:

Dell R730 8B LFF 2x 2.40GHz 14-Core Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 128GB RAM 4x 1TB HDD

Its $585 CAD + $107.49CAD shipping = $692.88 CAD delivered to my door.

This feels ridiculously overkill…like to the max… but its also a complete system for less than 700 bucks. Considering ewaste is 350, this doesn’t seem like a bad price. The two things that my wife is concerned about is power and noise, mostly noise. If this thing runs at 300watts 24/7 it works out to about 30 bucks a month in power… well considering Netflix in Canada in 25 bucks a month, it doesn’t seem so bad when I can just ramp up the pirating and cancel Netflix.

So after reading the forums and watching videos, and scouring reddit. This is what I have. I am reaching out to the community to see if there is something I have missed or any suggestions for making this possible. I am open to ANY hardware ideas or something cool I have missed. My GOAL is to try and get a complete system with some harddrives for $1000 CAD taxes in. If i have to spend an extra 100-200 bucks to get a complete setup that is WAY WAY better I will, but i am really trying to do this for $1000 CAD bucks or less, that is the goal.

Thank you Everybody for your time, It is much appreciated.

Frank

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I have been looking at building a small movie server at my folks and have been eyeing the AsRock N100 board.

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Noise will be an important consideratiton. And power, but you have a plan there.

It may be worth considering 5700G or even 5600G to save on both power and noise, and maybe even money.

Let us know what you decide on.

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That’s tight depending on the amount of storage you need. Though not impossible.

My suggestion is to go for Intel 12th gen. or newer for two reasons:

  1. proper low power states support
  2. iGPU with good decoding capability

Now, a good starting point could be an i3 12100 with any basic DDR4 motherboard you can get your hands on. It’s plenty powerful for hosting game servers and do anything you’ll want to do without using too much power (and in turn not being loud).
If the starting price is too high try to buy an AsRock N100M board for around 150$. It has the same 12th E-cores and iGPU as the new CPUs but in a low cost/low power package.

Depending on how much storage you want and what type of you might have more or less budget left for everything else.
If you don’t need too much storage (over 15TB) I’d be even inclined to point you towards SSDs. They’re silent, power efficient and you don’t need any cache or additional drives to avoid spinning up an array of mechanical HDDs.
I went for 6 Samsung 870 EVOs and, so far, has been a great choice for me. With a RAIDZ2 array I got 14.4TB of usable storage.
Also my rule of thumb for a safe array is 2 drives redundancy. One feels too little for me and taking the hit of “losing” another drive worth of capacity is a worth tradeoff in my opinion.

The unavoidable components are gonna be:

  • boot drive
  • RAM
  • PSU
  • case
  • fans
  • SATA card (depending on motherboard choice and number of drives)

Of these items I’d get the cheapest case possible, cheap-ish RAM (even used is gonna be fine and no XMP 2133MHz sticks are more than good enough), cheap but reliable boot drive, Arctic fans and the most efficient PSU you can squeeze into the budget. This is critical for an efficient machine that’s gonna be on 24/7. A machine like this spends most of it’s time idling and if you use a PSU that’s inefficient at low loads it’s gonna waste a lot of power over time.
The SATA card I’d suggest in one based on the ASM1166 due to proper ASPM support which means letting your CPU idle properly as low as possible.

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This was what I could come up with.

https://newegg.io/3fffc51

It comes out to $875.52 CAD with taxes and delivery.
Still no harddrives and defiantly easier on power but its 175-180 Dollars more than the used Enterprise server option. Also I have no doubt that the single core performance of a 12100 is way way better than a E5-2680v4 but how capable is a 12100 for running a NAS and VMs and a dedicated game server vs that Enterprise Monstrosity, that thing has 28 cores and 56 threads?

I am new to the Virtualization and Homelab space, so I have no idea what sort of resources things need/use.

Thanks again for the suggestion though.

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Depends on the scale of the operation you want to setup. A 2.5Gbit NAS can run on anything really, especially for a small household. For computing power the 12100 is 20% slower in multicore compared to one of those CPUs (the server you looked at is dual socket). And you’d need to add a GPU to that system for transcoding for Plex/Jellyfin. Unless you’re fine with direct play. Not to mention how it’s gonna scream when running even at idle.

I looked at your build and I’d suggest some changes:
https://www.newegg.ca/p/N82E16813162142?Item=N82E16813162142
https://www.newegg.ca/team-32gb/p/N82E16820331994?Item=N82E16820331994
https://www.newegg.ca/p/2AM-00CN-00033?Item=2AM-00CN-00033

Remove the SATA card for now because the budget doesn’t allow for one, that one is terrible with multiple chipset on boards and it’s using the JMB585 ones that notoriously don’t support ASPM. The motherboard has already 2.5Gbit on board so you don’t need a card to get better transfer speeds. The case is cheaper, comes with all the fans needed to properly cool the system though there’s just one 3.5" HDD mount so for more drive space you might need to resort to some DIY solutions. With these adjustments you recover a lot of budget for drives.

Else I think you should go a different route: get a known brand cheaper 2 bay NAS to back up all your data and a mini PC for all the virtualization and self hosting needs. I think this might be a better route for you because you’re gonna get two efficient parts, running indipendently and with decent performance.

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The card is terrible because it is PCIe Gen3 x1 only.

I’d use an 8-port SAS HBA any day over this one. Yes, it may use a little more power but you get value for it. You can minimize power consumption by using a (cheaper, but older) SAS2308 card.

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– their last post was 11 years ago.

Wew.

IDK what to say, $CAD are worthless. I hope you’re doing well wherever you are.

As far as the NAS goes, if electricity and noise are a concern, I’d split the builds. Get a small NAS that serves as a nextcloud machine or something (like an odroid h3 or an intel n100 build, or if you’re feeling really adventurous, a rockpro64 NAS). For backing up photos and videos, you don’t need crazy performance and spinning rust should probably be fine.

Although, like other’s expressed sentiments here, going for a SSD build (even bottom of the barrel ones) should be fine, given a cheap build. You can slap 4x 4tb ssds in the rockpro64, but performance won’t really be there even in stripped mirror - but that’s ok if what you’re aiming for is low power consumption. But the price is going to be quite high, probably way over the budget of $1000 CAD (that’s like $750 USD and a single 4tb ssd is about $220 USD). But you can’t really beat the low power envelope offered by cheap ARM SBCs, if that’s all you’re looking for.

If you want to use the same SSDs for other workloads (which I wouldn’t recommend), then you could go with an Intel board (like the aforementioned h3 or celeron n100). That should offer you plenty of juice out of a sata ssd array.

My advice, however, would be to get 2 spinning rusts, a 10tb mirror should last you a long time (but do consider the backups, you wouldn’t want a single point of failure). For a backup server, you can run something as barebones as an odroid hc4 (which is what I’m doing, it’s like $70, but you need a 15v 4A PSU which is probably another $20).

If your priority is data preservation and easy archival, you should go for the cheap builds that don’t use much power, but spinning rust is fine, since they’ll mostly idle. You can plan for a server at another time, maybe building a new rig for yourself, giving your old rig to your dad and using his old rig as a server for jellyfin and whatnot.

My take on important data storage, is that, if you don’t already have a storage and a backup server, then you should store them on different mediums than the other workloads, like minecraft scratch disks or movie collection. Of course, you don’t need to back up the minecraft or the movies, but you will be backing up the important stuff (family photos / videos and maybe digitalized documents). That way, if someone deletes something or the storage fails, you have the backups.

If you’re not very knowledgeable into unix CLI and don’t feel adventurous, I’d go for something like an asrock n100m build (should probably come around $350 USD without the storage and you could slap 2x 10tb hdd for like + $400, getting you right around your budget of $1000 CAD) and run TrueNAS Core (not Scale). You can run quite a few things on it, among them nextcloud, jellyfin and probably a minecraft server too. But I wouldn’t force a lot of stuff on it.

But you can run more smaller stuff, like a gitea instance, a website (since you’d be running an nginx for nextcloud anyway), a DNS sync-hole and more lightweight services. The later can run all together bundled on a raspberry pi 2 or zero-W.

I haven’t really thought about it, but I should start suggesting people that they run a monitoring software in their homelabs, like Zabbix or monit, because people seem to always forget to check their hardware for failures. Just like how I always suggest people do backups, I should also start suggesting they run something to alert them of problems before they become major. And these are not very demanding software to begin with.

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I tried looking for SSDs for their build, but looks like it blow the budget just for a couple of the shittiest 4TB SDDs available. If they could’ve gotten one for 200$ that would’ve been a whole other story.

Ain’t worth it for a beginner or someone that want’s to run game servers on it. For a Syncthing server it would’ve been perfect!

Looked for that too on Newegg CA and Amazon.ca and it’s either not available or stupid expensive.

TrueNas offers email notifications and Scale has Netdata running under the hood so it can be easly hooked up to get alerts or monitor the system. I don’t think those softwares are needed. When NOT using TrueNas it’s a good idea to do so.

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RIP our :maple_leaf: brothers and sisters

That’s why I said if OP’s feeling adventurous. But it’s not that difficult either. Just slapping Debian and OMV is pretty easy.

As for game servers, yes, I mentioned that this would be a separate build and only run it for the today’s main purpose: important files storage. Because building something that can do more, in that budget, is not very realistic, unless you go for small storage, like dual cheap 2TB drives.

And if you have like 5 phones with 256GB of storage now, you are already halfway full and in maybe one or two years you’ll need to upgrade again. Well, something could be said about cash-flow, but I absolutely hate the concept. It’s true that, to some degree, you’re getting the benefit of part of your build now, compared to not getting any benefit at all, vs getting the full benefit later one. I guess it’s more of a time preference thing, but I find that thinking so short-term and wanting everything instantly gratified is not healthy.

It can be made to work, like if you start storing the photos on an external 2tb USB SSD for a year or two, until you get more capital, then you upgrade to a NAS, but can still use the SSD for other stuff (like a ventoy boot drive, or a scratch disk for useless / easily recreateable data, like VM OS drive location). You get the benefit of both.

What if you’re running 20 VMs on a single TrueNAS? What if you have 5 truenas boxes? Checking all of them in zabbix and truenas in its own interface doesn’t make a lot of sense. Configuring alerts from both doesn’t either. So better to just integrate TN in your monitoring software too.

TBF, if you only have TN and you only run containers/jails, then yeah, maybe only running the TN alerts is fine. But in 99% of the cases, people will be running other stuff in their labs. They should monitor everything in one location.

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Absolutely! Even for a bit more complex arrays mdadm is pretty good, even if it’s not working on a block level bla bla bla.

At least it’s a backup of all of those importat memories and they’re not tied to a phone that could irremediably break one day. I agree, you gotta start somewhere. I guess collecting all types of different media with backups on them is sort of a rite of passage when it comes to backups. I still have floppy disks, RW CDs and DVDs and a 16GB USB stick that costed me 50$ when it was brand new.

r/datahoarders

Jokes aside I didn’t think of it on that scale since we we’re talking about an home enviroment. Consolidating is key and that’s how it should be done (and I have done to when putting in production some systems I had to revisit and upgrade at work).

Considering what most people are running as their home lab in this forum I bet they all do! The black sheeps here are people with a couple machines hahaha

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I appreciate all the Input. I think splitting up the NAS and VMs to different boxes might be the way to go. I really liked the 12100 idea and that got me thinking. So i put together a system using a PC Partpicker, a little easier than Newegg.ca.

Its $1029.30 before taxes which I think is not bad considering. I upgraded to the 12400 just to give me a little bit more grunt if needed. I have been looking into running dedicated game servers on TrueNas scale and as well as Unraid. I am trying to decide between the two at this point.

I know its not a lot of storage to start with but it gets the ball rolling. I can always snag higher capacity drives on sale and once I get either a full 4 to upgrade a vdev or swap out a parity drive in unraid, I will be able to upgrade the array to a larger size.

Again thanks for all the input its much appreciated. I had to increase the budget a bit to get something more reasonable but i feel like this is a good starting place especially for a home NAS with a few extras.

Thanks again,

Frank

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My 2c … don’t get the Dell server. I have an R430 (1U) that I’m no longer using as it’s just too damn loud. It was a great LAB VM machine though (which I could turn off between ‘sessions’).

I currently have a couple of older workstations that were decommissioned (out of warranty) - HP Z220’s (two so I have spares). Xeon CPU so registered RAM (error correction) and 6 SATA ports available for storage. Removed the GPU to save power as it runs headless. These guys are 2014 technology and are absolutely fine for NAS purposes. CPU is mostly running under 15% utilisation and 16GB RAM is also underused (I’ve checked). Big corporates turn over their hardware every 3-5 years so you can surely pick up something similar like a Dell Precision 5820 or HP Z2.

I run Unraid OS which boots off a tiny USB-FD … and run Plex with Sonaar and Radaar etc, as well as file server for home LAN. Uptime over 800 days and counting without missing a beat.

Unraid makes VM’s and Containers easy as plug-and-play (Hypervisor is built in) so Lab/experimentain is easy (assuming the hardware is virtual-capable). There’s also a reasonably ‘simple-to-setup’ photo’s backup tool that replicates iCloud backup for individual iPhones … I haven’t set it up yet, but thinking about it as we run low on Apple cloud storage space.

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NUC’s are pretty decent options, just get one with at least 4 cores and an extra slot for a drive and get the largest drive your budget permits, then get an external hdd and setup weekly backups to the external hdd. if you are having people who aren’t frequently on your network trying to backup to the nas you will need a vpn of some sort. I use Zerotier for accessing my nas from school and allowing my friends and i to play lan games across state borders because my landlord doesn’t allow port forwarding.

I also like Dell Optiplex computers but if your used market is really terrible then as long as it has 4 cores and upgradeable ram and storage it should work. you could even go less then 4 if you want to get another machine to focus on VM’s.

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