What and Why?

The What: Objective

  • To have a physical server available to me locally, that can run VMs/containers for my various homelab needs.
  • Needs to be cost effective, and power efficient too, as far as possible.
  • Essentially something to scratch my itch for homelab experimentation.

The Why

Dabbling in the homelab/home-server game for almost two years now, I wanted to have a physical computer/server for myself available locally. A homeserver/homelab has multiple uses:

  • One of the main uses for a homeserver for me is to run Plex and be able to do so with as little frustration as possible.

  • It’d be nice to have a NAS setup. I wanted to separate the NAS and Plex server functionality.

  • With so much local traffic amongst various VMs and containers, it would be a good idea to have a firewall like pfSense too.

Where?

With me in Bangalore, and my wife in London, I needed to decide where to have the system set up.

India

Pros:

  1. Cheaper power
  2. I will have physical access to the system when I’m at home, so debugging/OS level modifications and troubleshooting, etc will be easier.

Cons:

  1. Very limited used server equipment market. Sites for used items like OLX, and FB Marketplace are full of classifieds for ex-enterprise SFF systems. But they are very expensive compared to the UK. Even potential upgrades like RAM, storage, etc are expensive. And that is after the fact that the UK is costlier than the US.
  2. Unreliable power: though cheaper, electricity is quite unreliable where I live. We have power backup, but the changeover takes around 15 seconds. I have a UPS installed.
  3. Bandwidth is more expensive. All residential fibre internet plans in my area have a bandwidth cap of 3333GB a month. It should suffice, but a 1 Gbps connection is ~50 GBP here.

London

Pros:

  1. Cheaper internet: We got a great deal on a 1Gbps symmetrical fibre connection for 20 GBP a month.
  2. Better used computer equipment market: eBay UK has a lot of used hardware available for decent prices. I am less likely be scammed on eBay as compared to OLX, or FB Marketplace back in India. For instance, I found it impossible to get a decent deal on a PCIe NIC in India. On eBay, I got a Intel i340 based NIC for 15-20 quid.
  3. Better peering on Hyperoptic as compared to AirTel. This is a subjective observation, and I didn’t do enough research on this.

Cons:

  1. Expensive power: I mean HOLY $H!T. With the UK dependant on gas for electricity, and the Russo-Ukraine war, power prices are around £ 0.30/KWhr. That is atleast 4 TIMES more expensive than power in India.
  2. Limited space: Having a small apartment in London, my ‘homelab’ had to fit in the utility closet.
  3. Tougher troubleshooting and maintenance: My wife will have to be my ‘remote-hands support’, our work schedules, plus the timezone diff means it can take almost 24 hours to just do a power cycle on the system. Shoutout to solutions like Pi-KVM and Tinypilot, but they cost almost as much as one of the computers I’ll be using.

What I Need

The CPU

I was certain I needed a modern CPU with a decent version of Intel QuickSync. Intel QuickSync is a beast when it comes to transcoding and it is really useful when running Plex. This thread at serverbuilds.net gives a great explanation, and examples of how good QS is for hardware transcoding.

A Celeron CPU also is sufficient for multiple transcodes. But I’ll get a bit greedy, as you’ll see, if you choose to continue reading.

RAM

The more, the better, I thought. Because I plan to use Proxmox as a hypervisor, and I want the ability to run multiple VMs/LXC containers.

Storage

This was the big one. I have been using a Google Drive account which allows for unlimited storage, but Google has been clamping down on this lately. And I didn’t want to be caught with all my data lost one fine day. I keep a backup of critical data, yes. But it is still a pain to build a media library from scratch.

I calculated my storage requirement to be around 10TB.

r/datahoarder introduced me to concept of ‘shucking’ an external drive - turns out most high capacity USB externa drives contain standard internal 3.5’’ hard drives. Interesting enough, these external drives are often sold cheaper than retail packaged hard drives - So cool!

The subreddit also led me to https://shucks.top this site scrapes multiple vendors for shuckable external hard drives. The $/TB price is a useful metric: $15/TB being the gold standard, Black Friday pricing.

What I Got

Dell Inspiron 3470

After reading the serverbuilds.net forum thread on Intel QuickSync for plex, I narrowed my options down to getting a pre-built with an i3-8100 or i3-9100.

The integrated graphics bundled with 8/9th gen Intel CPUs are plenty for multiple plex transcodes, and can also run pfSense VM, etc in parallel.

Found a deal on FB Marketplace for a sparingly used Dell Inspiron 3470, with an i3-8100, 4GB RAM and 1 TB spinning rust for £ 112 shipped. The money went towards a charity for Guide Dogs for the Blind.

A couple of days later, it had arrived in original packaging:

Sadly, I was in India, while this came to our London apartment. Had to play the patience game. :(

Cooler Master Elite 130 Mini ITX

I lost the patience game 🙄

Looking for the Inspiron got me hooked to eBay. I’d never seen so much variety and such prices before, so ofcourse I got crazy. Entered a bidding war on a random listing for a mini NAS/HTPC in a Cooler Master Elite 130 case with local pickup in London. Won it! For £ 64, I got:

  • Intel Celeron G3930: dual core, 7th Gen low power CPU. Should be capable of plex transcoding as well!

  • Asus H110i Plus mini ITX motherboard.

  • 1 stick of 8GB DDR4 RAM

  • CX450M: A 450W Corsair modular standard sized PSU

  • 3 x 2 TB seagate hard drives (S.M.A.R.T tests passed on all) and a 500GB 2.5 inch hard drive for the OS.

This was an impulse purchase (one of many), but it should serve well as a low power always-on NAS.

Other Components

Feeding my eBay scouting addiction, I bought:

  • An Intel T340-T4 based quad-ethernet NIC: For pfSense

    I had initially bought an Intel® PRO/1000 PT based quad ethernet PCIe NIC. However, after reading this discussion on serverbuilds.net, I decided to cancel the order and ordered the T340-T4 instead.

  • A Kingston E100 enterprise SSD [200GB]: These have a TBW rating of 857TB for the 200GB version, compared to 300TB for the A400 SSD below.

  • A Kingston A400 960GB SSD (cheap, consumer grade)

  • A 128GB M.2 SATA SSD

  • A WD Red 500GB M.2 SATA SSD: Apparently they are marketed as NAS SSDs, have a TBW of upto 350TB.

Additional RAM: Shoutout to hotukdeals.com Grabbed a 32GB kit of Corsair Vengeance 3200MHz kit for £ 83. As I realised later that though the computer I ended up can’t support more than 2400MHz, it alllows for future-proofing.

So in March, I finally flew to London from Bangalore, carrying an assortment of power cables, SATA cables, splitters, etc.

Read more here: My Christmas Came Early