My budget is ~500 Euro.
I haven’t built a PC in 10 years, I gave no idea where to start.
It will mostly be used to run Nextcloud, Minecraft Server and some future homelab projects.
I’m thinking of using this for the case https://www.the-diy-life.com/introducing-lab-rax-a-3d-printable-modular-10-rack-system
Where do I start? What CPU or motherboard would you recommend? I want it to be somewhat future proof and also act as a NAS
Why not a second hand small “business” or office pc? There are so many on the market now because businesses are replacing because of windows 11, while the hardware runs perfectly fine with Linux for probably many years to come. Buying one of those is cheap and reduces e-waste.
My “production” home lab is 3 Optiplex 3050 with i7-7700. They work great and are pretty low power.
IMO MiniITX are a real PITA to build for on a budget. Most of the smaller components are sold at a premium because of their size.
I sell these things for a living and its exceptionally difficult to compete with pre-built ITX boards. Generally, I have to get a really great deal to come out on top vs some of the prefab models.
Because of that, unless you need something very specific and can’t find it elsewhere, I generally suggest that you do some research and find a nice prefab one for your needs. If you don’t mind spending the extra $, then building them is a hell of a lot of fun because you can customize them and you get exactly what you want, nothing extra.
Replacing the mini-rack with a completely 3D printable version will pretty significantly curtail the cost (between 1-300 euro because mini-racks are fucking expensive), so it might really be worth it if you can. Everything else is pretty trivial. Only thing you’ll have to make sure is you get a CPU and MB with enough PCIe lanes for you to expand to what you want. Specifically a PCIe X4 to 6 port SATA 3 host controller. The board only uses 4x lanes, but you’ll have to ensure that all 4 lanes are available or you’ll see reduced read/write speeds.
ITX is fun to build, but really limits your options and expandability.
For an ITX build make sure you’ve got a CPU with integrated graphics, so you’re not wasting a slot for a GPU. You can also get an internal SATA/RAID card to expand the amount of drives you can have.
Can’t do a full build for that amount. Just get a MiniPC. Check out Minisforum’s Refurb listings. Dirt cheap, and come with a warranty. Better hurry though…
Main issue is drives. If your data is modest, multiple NVMe drives could be affordable, but if you have lots of data, you’ll want HDDs, and those won’t fit. Make sure you actually want a miniPC down the line before buying, because expansion is limited.
How much is “limited?” I’ve got one of those AMD Ryzen mobile CPU jobs that I bought new, from Amazon, for $300. I added a 2TB M.2 drive for another $100. For a bit over $200 ($230?) you can get a 4TB M.2 NVMe.
And that’s for fast storage. There’s USB3 A and C ports, so nearly unlimited external - slower, but still faster than your WiFi - drives.
When bcachefs is reliable, it’s got staged multi-device caching for the stuff you’re actually using, and background writing to your slower drives. I’m really looking forward to that, but TBH I have all of our media on a USB3 SSD it’s plenty fast enough to stream videos and music from.
Yeah, I really don’t know what constraints OP is working under. Here are mine:
- >8TB max capacity - lots of Blu-ray rips, which grows every year (currently 3-4TB, grows by 1TB or so per year)
- RAID mirror - my media isn’t backed up, so this reduces my need to re-rip if a drive dies
- no hard requirement on speed, I only need 1-2 concurrent streams, and a single HDD is probably sufficient for that
If I was building today, I’d probably still go HDD because few mobos have >2 NVMe slots, and NVMe gets expensive at higher capacities, especially if RAID is on the table.
If my NAS was 100% backed up, I wouldn’t need RAID and I would probably use NVMe to save on space and complexity.
bcachefs
Why tho? Just use btrfs or zfs, they’re proven in production, and have a lot of good documentation.
This all day. USB3 has plenty of bandwidth to keep those spinners busy, and a cheap pc can be bought for under $200 that would handle all the services op described, plus more.
I bought an n150 with 12gb RAM, dual 2.5gb nic, built in nvme and USB 3.2. it uses like 15w of power, is basically silent, and with a 5 bay HDD attached I’ve got enough storage for whatever.
Building a home lab server from components is only a good idea if you have some really specific use case not covered by cheap imports…
How reliable are those though? The ones I’ve looked at have really crappy controllers.
I generally get my inspiration from https://forums.serverbuilds.net/ mainly the NAS killer posts (the website seems to be down at the moment of posting).
Then I adapt according to my local second hand market. Everything is bought from auction sites like eBay and some parts need patience to find a good price.
