I’m currently running my homserver on a Beelink with an N100 CPU and it has been totally fine.
I am however doing some remodeling of the house, and as part of that I will be building a network closet. Mostly to get switches etc. out of my home office.
I have a 24u rack, a 4u rack chassi (currently empty) and some network stuff. And of course the above mentioned Beelink and a HomeAssistant Green.
Now I’m going to replace the Beelink by building something into the 4U that I have.
The plan is to run HexOS and a bunch of SATA-drives for expanded storage compared now.
The workload is not heavy in general, but *arr with related stuff, Emby, a Minecraft server for 2 kids is on there right now.
I’m contemplating if I should either go for a Ryzen 5600-ish with an Arc310 or one of those ”NAS motherboards” on AliExpress with the N355 CPU.
I am looking at ZFS for storage. I have long since concluded that ECC is NOT a must have for me.
Any input very appreciated as I’m on the fence myself.
The nas boards you’re talking about from Topton seem to be well-liked by the guy at nascompares (youtube). I remember reading he actually imported a whack of them to sell to westerners who are wary of using AliExpress et al, though I think it was a n100/n150 version (they’re effectively all the same board though). There is also a low end 12 gen i3 variant floating around.
They’re quite impressive versus an am4 consumer board turned nas. You can also find ryzen based nas boards from China but these seem to use a lot of engineering samples.
If you go with the intel board, you might be able to ditch the arc card?
Read someone that tried a 48gb stick that worked as well.
I’m however currently looking at something in the 5600g range (maybe even 5650g Pro) to get a bit more expandability. I’ll be adding an Arc310 to that.
Your selection of CPUs/GPUs seems to indicate that power consumption is already part of your selection criteria. If not, it should be.
If you’re looking AM4 platform, look for mATX boards which don’t come with all bells and whistles and therefore have a reduced power consumption.
Look for boards that provide full PCIe connectivity with multiple usable PCIe slots (open slots or 16x mechanical).
Consider the AM5 platform for no other reason that you may save the GPU unless you have a strong need for it.
My 24/7 homelab server is based on a AMD Ryzen 5700g - despite all reports on this forum and on the internets the iGPU works just fine for accelerating a large list of codecs.
When concerned about power consumption consider using NVMe drives. There are plenty of options to save lots of power compared to HDDs while having orders of magnitude faster storage - even with older gen3 drives.
Finally - use any platform that doesn’t require you to go shopping for RAM. The prices are brutal and seemingly will be for a while.
Do you really need a HBA? How many drives do you envision you will need (a bunch of SATA-drives)? The AsRock B550m can connect 6 sata drives. In a RAID-Z1 config and conservative 20TB drives that would provide 100TB usable storage space.
Having fewer but larger drives saves energy
Using onboard SATA ports saves energy over a dedicated HBA
What do you envision you need SATA SSD drives for? Use a larger nvme drive (2TB/4TB/8TB) and partitioning. NVMe gen3 is easily 5 times as fast as SATA and you don’t have the power overhead and the complexities of managing more drives.
I mentioned that it is not clear to me why you think you need a dedicated GPU when the iGPU can do transcoding. That adds significant power consumption (and cost) to the build. Obviously, you have your own requirements/wants/needs.
I envision something along the lines of:
1st nVME for boot, I have a 256gb one that should do perfectly fine.
2nd nVME for VMs (disables 2 SATA ports)
HDDs (up to 8 of them) for long-term storage, or rather I have room for 10 but have not yet decided which route to take. Either more smaller drives for higher redundancy, or fewer large capacity.
In your vision the expansion capabilities of your motherboard are the most limited resource.
Also, the more devices you attach to your motherboard the higher the power consumption. You will have to find the compromise that works for you.
Device
Performance
Power consumption
NVMe Gen 3
high
low
SATA SSD
med
low
HDD
low
high
Assuming you want your system to run 2* 4/7 the OS drive will not be very active. A SATA SSD is perfectly fine for this use case.
For a system with your requirements (*arr with related stuff, Emby, a Minecraft server for 2 kids ) there is likely not that much zfs metadata that the use of special devices are warrented. By default zfs keeps metadata in memory and will only resort to a special device if not all metadata can be kept in memory. As a result the investment into devices for this purpose is likely a waste.
OTOH a zfs special device can also store blocks with recordsize up to a specified limit (turned off by default). All storage devices slow significantly when accessing (reading and writing) smallest block sizes. A zfs special device configured to store all blocks up to a recordsize of, say, 64kb would allow the already slow HDDs to spend more time at higher performance. If support of this use case warrents the capex of sata or even nvme ssds and the opex of operating these devices is up to you. I think most people will agree that this is an advanced use case and not strictly necessary.
I am sure you already researched HDD prices. Acquiring up to 8 HDDs is most likely the most expensive part of your system. Also, with about 5w power consumption per HDD this is likely the dominating contributor of power consumption in your system. For this reason deploying less HDDs with highest capacity optimizes capex and opex and likely is an investment into future expandability. Largest HDDs (>20TB) carry a premium (on a $/TB basis) over smaller capacity HDDs - the sweet spot seems to still be in the 8TB range. This is another compromise you need to navigate. Ultimately you need to define how much storage you want to have available at the start and what rate of expansion you envision in the near to medium future. I have seen storage capacity requirements vary quite significantly on this forum and others - so I’d say this is a very personal thing.
should you decide that 4 HDDs is sufficient as a starting point (allowing the use of two fast nvme drives) you can save the investment (both capex and opex) into a HBA. Depending on the generation an HBA consumes 7-14W which I would see as significant in your system (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQOI2pUUVDE for details). A side-effect of this is the conclusion that investing in SATA SSDs does not make a lot of sense in 2025. Why would you forego the performance advantages of NVMe when storage capacity and costs are comparable?
I have, based on your comments, and more googling/reading decided on the following:
64gb DDR4 ECC, found a good deal with a used-server-parts-vendor here in Sweden, did a bundle with some other stuff and I couldn’t resist,.
Motherboard ordered, Asrock X570 Pro4. Higher consumtion than the one initially listed, but has 8 SATA ports so by removing the need for an HBA card I think it will even out in the end.
Found a PSU with high efficiency during low load.
Most likely I will be going with UnRAID as the OS, allowing my to easily expand over time with disks instead of committing to a certain setup right now.
I’m currently making do with a 4tb SSD in a Beelink, but that have required maintenance and deletion that I am looking to avoid in the future.
I know that I will add one NVME for virtual machines, and a SATA SSD for fast storage before it is moved over the HDD on a nightly basis.
Still on the fence if I will activate spindown off disks in UnRAID or not, I think my usage over time will have to tell.
Their web page is really bad (especially on mobile), but they list a lot of stuff on Tradera as well and have REALLY nice people if you email them. They find stuff that are not listed, send pictures and are very helpful in general
