Home Lab Tour - Hardware

• Lab
• Pi

In this post, I’ll cover the hardware that I am using for my homelab. This has been my biggest hobby for the past year. Later in a future post, I’ll cover the operating system(s) that I am running, any interesting self-hosted services, and future plans.

At the time of writing, my homelab is still modest, consisting of only two main computers.

The black server on the left is called “lab”. The raspberry pi is in the background to the left of the router and switch.

Lab

This server is the main workhorse. It’s my “all in one solution” that compromises between compute, memory, and storage. I wanted a server that could function as a NAS, workstation, and more. With the current configuration, the server idles at around 10W.

I bought the parts to the server early in January 2025 when parts were still pretty cheap. Excluding the storage, the server cost about $600 to build.

The storage was about $400-500 in total between the SSDs and HDDs.

The specs are as follows:

1. System board: ASUS ROG Strix B760-l
   • ITX board
   • Supports modern hardware up to 14th gen CPUs, DDR5 memory, and PCIe 5.0
   • 4 SATA ports (most ITX boards either come with 0 or 2)
2. CPU: i3-14100
   • Low power draw and decent performance
3. RAM: 2×16GB 4800MHz
   • Good amount of memory, but not too overkill
   • Note that memory speed is limited by CPU choice
4. Chassis: Jonsbo N2
   • Mini ITX form factor
   • Built-in HDD/SSD compartments
5. Storage
   • ZFS filesystem for de-duplication and redundancy
   • Root filesystem running 2×2TB NVME SSDs (2TB usable)
   • Shared filesystem running 3×4TB HDDs (8TB usable)

The case bay are five SATA slots, but I have only populated three of them so far.

This server runs pretty much everything in my self-hosted service stack.

• Actual
  • Budget tracker
• Mealie
  • Recipe manager
• Navidrome
  • Music manager and streamer
• Wireguard
  • VPN server

I do have a few regrets about the system after a year of using it.

• I should have purchased larger storage, just to be safe from data loss in future migrations
  • For example, 8TB HDDs is the minimum size that I should have gone for just for its storage density value proposition
  • With my ZFS setup (RAIDz1), I only get 8TB of usable space. If I instead went for a mirror with 2×8TB, I would still get the same amount of usable space
• I should have bought the 2×32GB memory kit
  • I didn’t know that prices for RAM were going to skyrocket, but in retrospect that was the perfect time to parts
  • I am only running into memory issues when I try to run larger Ollama models like Gemma3
  • I am also experimenting with running three separate Minecraft servers at the same time. Though I haven’t hit any issues yet, I would have better peace of mind since these servers can be quite intensive
• The CPU is great, but sometimes I want it had more power
  • High compute tasks like rebuilding NixOS configurations can take a while
  • With the system board choice, I am also locked into 14th gen CPUs
• I still need to setup an offsite backup server (like yesterday)
  • Having everything bundled together in one server means I have one point of failure. A power outage or hardware failure could corrupt data
  • Along this point, I probably want to invest in a UPS in case of power outages

The exact configuration, at the time of writing, can be found here.

Pi

I am running a standard Raspberry Pi 4b 2GB.

I originally bought this computer for a college class on building sensor systems. The idea was to connect hardware like sensors, buttons, etc. to the GPIO pins on the RPI and do cool experiments. At the time in 2021, the Pi was about $100, give or take.

Given its hardware limitations, it can only run lightweight services. The compute is so weak that it can’t run NixOS rebuilds on its own. I offload that work to my other server.

The RPI’s reliability and low power draw makes it a perfect candidate for high availability services.

• AdGuard Home
  • Domain Name Server (DNS)
  • Domain based ad-blocking
• DuckDNS DDNS client
  • Dynanmic DNS updater
• iSponsorBlockTV
  • YouTube ad skipper
• Uptime Kuma
  • Service monitoring tool

The exact configuration, at the time of writing, can be found here.

Other

I don’t have any other fancy gear besides these two servers. Everything else is pretty standard equipment that I got from my dad. I’m still running 1GB CAT5e ethernet cables and a single un-managed switch. I’m not sure how important it is for me yet to build a server rack with patch panels and rack mounted servers and equipment. Though it looks cool, it is way overkill for my use case.