Home lab 2026 — post your rack (or cardboard box)

Numbers please. What PSU, what wall meter, what load during test? I see too many "15W" claims that are actually 23W with a cheap kill-a-wonky.

I ran my J4125 mini pc through a proper power analyzer. 11.2W idle, 19.8W peak. That's with a real 80plus gold brick, not the fire hazard that comes in the box.

$ stress-ng --cpu 4 --timeout 60
stress-ng: info:  [1234] dispatching hogs: 4 cpu
# wall meter reads 19.8W steady

Your T430 has a 90W adapter minimum. 15W would be impressive. Suspect.

This is why I stopped posting numbers

My "dead battery gaming laptop" pulls 45W idle according to the cheap meter I bought from aliexpress. Is that real? Who knows. The meter also says my phone charger pulls 2W with nothing plugged in so probably not

The lxc-in-lxc k8s thing was using 12GB ram just for kube-system pods. Nested container networking is cursed. Would not recommend unless 3am

Yeah yeah, efficiency this, tco that. I know. But see, I already own all this stuff. The pis were gifts, the optiplexes were $40 each, the switch pile was accumulated over years. A new ryzen build is $400+ before I even buy ram.

My actual problem is I can't stop finding more free computers. Last week a neighbor was throwing out a core 2 duo desktop with 4GB ram. I took it. It's in the closet now. I named it regrets.

The OVHcloud vps comparison was a joke mostly. Though at $35/month for power I could get their 2 vcore 4GB vps — https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/vps/ — and not maintain anything. Where's the fun in that.

Contabo's NAT vps is €4/month right? I looked at those for a reverse proxy endpoint but the bandwidth pooling made me nervous. 100TB sounds like a lot until you run jellyfin for four family members.

I ended up with a Hetzner cloud cx21 in Falkenstein for €6/month. 20TB traffic, dedicated ipv4, no nat nonsense. Wireguard back to the house works fine. The latency from Portland to Germany is worse but for $2 more I sleep better.

# hetzner falkenstein to portland
$ ping -c 10 hel1
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 158.2/162.4/171.1/4.2 ms

Not great, not terrible.

Used market, my friend. I picked up a 5600x with board and 32GB for $180 on facebook marketplace last month. Sold the board for $40 because I already had one. $140 for a cpu that idles at 35W and turbos to 4.6GHz.

Your optiplex 9020s are what, haswell? 4th gen i5? The 5600x will match both of them combined at half the power. TCO matters when you pay the electric bill.

That said, I get the "already own it" logic. The r640s were a splurge. I just like having proper ipmi and redundant psus. Overkill for home? Absolutely.

For pure compute it's fine. For bulk storage it's a non-starter unless you like paying $/GB for 2.5" sas ssds.

The supermicro 846 is a tank. 70 pounds empty, takes two people to rack. But 24x 3.5" bays with a sas3 backplane means I can grow forever. Currently at 96TB raw, could hit 400TB with 20TB drives.

I run proxmox on bare metal, zfs for the storage vm, then everything else in vms or lxc. The unraid vm is legacy from before I learned zfs properly. One of these weekends I'll migrate the array and kill it.

$ zpool list
NAME   SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP
tank   116T  78.3T  37.7T        -         -    12%    67%  1.00x

78TB used. Mostly linux isos.

€3.99 yeah, but it's ipv6 only with a single forwarded ipv4 port. Fine for wireguard, useless for hosting anything directly. I use it as a bounce point, not a server.

The real find was that marketplace Dell. Optiplex 9020 SFF, not even the tiny form factor. Room for a low profile gpu if I wanted, though the igpu handles jellyfin fine for my use. 4 transcodes of h264 1080p, no sweat. Never tried 4k, my upload couldn't handle it anyway.

UK broadband is 35Mbps up on a good day. Virgin Media, "up to" 52Mbps. Reality is lower.

I feel this in my soul. I live in Ashburn, literally next to the internet, and my residential comcast is 35Mbps up on paper. The fiber guys want $150/month for symmetric gig because my street is "low density."

At work we peer with networks that move terabits. At home I wait for plex to buffer. The irony is not lost on me.

I run a mikrotik crs309 at home just because I can get 10gbe to my desk for the lab. The actual internet connection is the bottleneck always.

proxmox or bare metal zfs? I keep going back and forth. proxmox zfs works but the memory pressure with dedup scares me

Currently running truenas scale on an old r720xd I got for $150. 12x 3.5" bays, dual e5-2670v2, 192GB ram. Truenas handles the storage, then I run vms for the apps. Feels wrong somehow but it works

Is proxmox + zfs on the same box better? Or worse? Everyone has an opinion, nobody has numbers

Following this thread closely. Just got my first "server" - a dell t320 from ebay. Single e5-2450v2, 64GB ram, 8x 3.5" bays for $120.

Haven't decided between proxmox or truenas yet. Leaning proxmox because I want to run more than just storage. Is 64GB enough for zfs + vms?