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
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.
Yeah, the case and mobo are frequently 2x the price of a mATX build. But pretty much everything else can be done on a budget (e.g. I’m using an ATX PSU in my ITX case).
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.
Fujitsu Esprimo here… 50 €, before the extra RAM, SSDs, … Relatively low power usage, lots of SATA, PCI slots, lots of USB ports… Works very well for all except transcoding. Could put a GPU but it would really make power consumption go up
Wouldn’t something like a T1000 (50w/8GB) be okay? I know I use a much older matrox card (30w?/ w/ even lower TDP) for this purpose. It’s not great, but it transcodes in hardware.
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.
Shit, that’s a lot of storage. K.
I’ve lived on btrfs for years. I love the filesystem. However, RAID had been unreliable for a decade now, with no indication that it will ever be fixed; but most importantly, neither btrfs not zfs have prioritized multi-device support, and bcachefs does.
You can configure a filesystem built from an SSD, a hard drive, and a USB drive, and configure it so that writes and reads go to the SSD first, and are eventually replicated to the hard drive, and eventually eventually to the USB drive. All behind the scenes, so you’re working at SSD speeds for R/W, even if the USB hasn’t yet gotten all of the changes. With btrfs and zfs, you’re working at the speed of the slowest device in your multi-device FS; with bcachefs, you work at the speed of the fastest.
There’s a lot in there I don’t know about yet, like: can it be configured s.t. the fastest is an LRU? But from what I read, it’s designed very similar to L1/L2 cache and main memory.
RAID is production ready on btrfs, the only issue is the write hole on RAID 5/6. If you don’t need RAID 5/6, you’re fine. I use RAID 1, which is 100% production ready.
multi-device support
Ah, I’ve never considered that use case. My HDD RAID 1 array is plenty fast for what I need.
But isn’t that basically what a cache drive does? It mostly caches reads, but I think it can cache writes too.
Good to know if that’s your use case, but it sounds pretty niche to me.
4-bay USB4 HDD enclosure is $60. It’ll do fine.
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…
I would say with all of these recommendations, you can probably look to find an AM4 motherboard and user ddr4 instead of ddr5 ram secondhand. If you play heavily modded Minecraft, ddr4 ram will be much more affordable to opt for 64 GB if you want to allocate 20-30gb and keep a lot free still. AM4 motherboards cover a large range of CPUs up to ryzen 5xxx I think. there’s a lot of room for upgrades if you can only find one of the older CPUs. I jumped from a 2700x to a 3900x recently and it’s been great
Edit: only just read your future proof comment. Older parts may not be the way to go then, since you’re restricting upgrades to things which already exist Edit again: I thought about it some more and I think this tier of parts is actually future proof, in that it should do the things you said you’re interested in doing into the foreseeable future
From my experiance with minecraft servers ryzen is the way to go.
I would recommend getting a used ryzen 5 5600g or ryzen 7 5700g i found some for less than 80€ on ebay. For the mainboard i would either get a cpu + mainboard combo or get it new as i haven’t found any non broken used boards. Pretty much anything is fine, just look out for the number of pcie slots and the lane distribution between them and if it supports lane bifurcation (you need this if you want to add m.2 expantion boards) if you want to add a hba or network card later on and that the board has 4 ram slots. Get at least 32gb of ram, 64gb is better and get them as 2 sticks, so you can upgrade later, ddr4 is cheap now. Storage wise I would reccommend 2 sata ssds as boot drives and 2 nvmes (if the mainboard supports it) for data.
So as an example (only 1 boot drive) with the prices ive found:
U: used (ebay); N: new
CPU U Ryzen 7 5700g w. heat sink 75€ RAM U 2x32gb corsair vengeance lpx 80€ MB U msi b550-a pro 82€ PSU N bequiet system power 550w 52€ SSD1 N crucial bx 500 250gb 16.5€ SSD2 N crucial p3 plus 2tb (2x) 198€ Result 503.5€ This mainboard isn’t itx, but you should find one that is for a similar price!
Software wise you can try out debian, truenas or something else, but try to use zfs. Im personally using debian on zfs root running minecraft servers in docker containers with docker-compose but running lodestone (a web ui for mc servers) would also be an option. Running nextcloud in a container is also pretty easy
This is a great specific response based on the principle in my comment. Thank you for taking the time for OP and others. I feel like the Vega iGPU on the ryzen 5xxx is meant to be pretty good too right?
I don’t own a ryzen 5xxx but from my experience with a ryzen 3xxx in a laptop, its enough to run most games (at least that I play) at 1080p 60 at low to medium settings. So yea it’s pretty good.
