Read to find out where I host my Home Lab Services
About 10 years ago I decided that i needed to buy a server for my home (Home Lab was not a term back then), and I found HP’s ProLiant Micro Server Gen 10, show bellow, to be a good option.
It sported an AMD Opteron X3216, which was a decent, low power CPU, for the time, 8GB RAM and 4 HDD bays, behind the removable front cover. It also blended nice beside my TV in the living room.
My main and most important requirement for that server was be a storage provider for backups, but over the time I also run other services, like qBittorrent, Grafana, and a custom homepage for my home network. Also being next to the TV, served as a media center for a while. But time has come for the server to be retired, at least from the position of the primary Home Lab server.
The aging hardware had started showing it’s limitations, with the main issue being the CPU, and the lack of containers support under windows, and so I started looking around for replacements. As I wanted to keep the budget low I carefully evaluated my requirements and I choose to split the Media Center role from the Home Lab server role.
After searching around, I finally decided to trust the AIOPCWA (???) PC/NAS that at ~300€ seed a nice deal, with Intel’s N100, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD and 2 3.5 HDD Bays. It’s a bit of downgrade from the 4 Bays on the previous server but my backup needs are bellow 2TBs of data, so 2 bays should be more that enough. At this point let me note, that I am not in favor of RAID, as I much prefer to add reliability by adding a second backup target (that will be my old sever) than adding more disks on the same PC.
Since I had a new 6TB HDD laying around I decided to use that for my movie gallery and add an 8TB HDD that seemed to both have a low cost per TB and also be more that sufficient to handle my needs (I actually ordered 2 8TB HDDs, the second one will replace a disk on my old server). I also decided to upgrade the RAM to 16GBs to provide a bit of headroom for my services.
And speaking of services I run the following on the new server
All services run via docker on windows 11 (probably not the best option, but it’s what I am familiar with) and as it’s evident from the dashboard bellow there is a lot of headroom
At this point I should note that this PC is available under multiple brand names, and the best way to find it in your preferred amazon store is to do a google image search - I will add two affiliate links bellow for amazon’s global store. (I bought it from amazon.de)
Disclaimer: The products mentioned in this article were bought in full price with my own money for my own use. The links bellow are affiliate links and I will earn a commission if a purchase is made via them: