I was debating between getting myself a NAS or some PC to setup my homelab. I decided for a PC as it gives me more freedom to install and personalize it the way I want.
At the moment I’m running FreeBSD with jails on a Q920 with an i5 processor, 16 GB of RAM, one internal SSD with 512 GB and 2 external USB SDDs with each 1 TB which costed me around 300 Euros.
Seems more than enough for the services I want to provide to myself which are the following.
Navidrome > serves all my music locally and remotely.
Zabbix > to monitor my servers
DNSMasq > ad blocking and local dns
gitea > repo for code and other docs
Transmission > torrenting
Radicale > webcal and webdav
Photoprism > local photo gallery
Vaultwarden > Password manager
SearXNG > search
HAproxy > to serve my public content easily to the web
Mastodon
Emby > local media server
And I run a Linux VM on bhyve to serve 2 tools that I was not able to make work easily on FreeBSD.
Besides that, the node replicates some data from my VPS as a backup solution.
And I can’t complain at all. That PC is doing its job just fine. No need for any rack that uses huge amount of electricity.
Use case(s) for owning a homelab?
So I was wondering, what is exactly the use case of owning a server rack with huge CPUs and 256GB of DDR4 RAM with 1PB of storage?...