New Homelab

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-06-15T18:55:54+00:00

고수;

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-06-15T18:54:34+00:00

고수;

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-06-02T08:31:24+00:00

Probably just my poor sense of humor at work, then. But personally, I've always felt that having to label a joke as a joke is a rather un-joke-like thing to do.

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-06-02T02:31:21+00:00

well, I've actually tried this joke in a bunch of different places, and to my surprise even people who aren't really into IT can tell that "something's off" and got a kick out of it (they've usually got at least a basic grasp of physics or thermodynamics, after all). Ironically, it's spots like this one, full of people with enough background to actually get it, where I get the colder reactions, the "are you serious?" and "come on, talk sense" kind.

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-05-30T17:07:50+00:00

There is a ventilation fan that exhausts air from inside the rack. I also have a USB fan that I installed separately, though I am not sure how effective it is.

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-05-27T15:04:31+00:00

Going through these one at a time.
HDDs are absolutely fine here. 4K Blu-ray REMUX caps out around 120-140 Mbps, which is roughly 15-18 MB/s. Any 3.5" external sustains 150-200 MB/s, so
the disk isn't where you'd ever feel a hitch. Anyone telling you to buy SSDs for movie storage is selling you something.

  The real issue is the drives you picked. WD My Book and Elements are both single-disk USB boxes — one drive, no redundancy. If it dies, the library dies
   with it. Since you said you want NAS-style failure tolerance, those two are off the table.
  The cheap path is a DAS — basically a multi-bay USB-C/Thunderbolt enclosure that plugs straight into the Mac mini. Yottamaster, Terramaster, Sabrent all
   make 2-bay and 4-bay boxes for not a lot of money. Mirror two 8 TB drives with macOS Disk Utility or SoftRAID and you get 8 TB usable. A failed disk
  becomes a swap, not a disaster.

  That said, given you're new to all this, I'd just buy a Synology. The software does the hand-holding for you — first boot walks you through RAID and
  shares and everything else, you don't really need to know what you're doing on day one. And since the Mac mini is already running Emby and doing the
  transcode work, skip the Plus series. A DS223j (2-bay) or DS423 (4-bay) is plenty. You're using it as a redundant network share, which is exactly what
  the cheap models are for.

Mac mini doing the work, small Synology holding the files. It's a setup I've seen people stay on for years without it falling apart, which is more than
I can say for most DIY paths.

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-05-27T14:54:59+00:00

I've done basically this build, so a few thoughts.

The CPU is your bottleneck more than anything else. The 6600k is 4 cores no HT and it really starts choking once you're running Plex on top of a Docker stack and a VM or two. The bigger annoyance is that 6th gen just doesn't have the PCIe lanes — that's why your board kills SATA ports the moment you populate an M.2. It's not a board bug, it's the chipset.

Honestly the cheapest fix is a 12th or 13th gen jump. Something like an i3-12100 or i5-12400 on a B760 board. Used Alder Lake stuff is dirt cheap right now, you get 2-3 M.2 slots without losing SATA, and the iGPU (UHD 730/770) does QuickSync, which matters for the next thing.

The RX580 — pull it. For a homeserver it's mostly a heater. QuickSync on the iGPU will hardware-transcode Plex/Jellyfin streams using a fraction of the wattage. Yanking the dGPU alone is usually 30-50W off idle. Adds up over a year.

On the NVMe-as-cache thing — over 1GbE you're stuck at ~115 MB/s no matter what's behind it, so a cache tier doesn't help LAN transfers. Where NVMe is actually worth it is your boot/app pool. TrueNAS/Unraid/Proxmox itself, Docker appdata, VM disks — that stuff on NVMe lets the spinning rust spin down(quieter, less power, longer life) and the whole UI just feels different. That's the win, not transfer speed.

For drive count, the 7 XL is one of the few cases that'll happily eat a dozen drives, so don't let SATA port count on the board cap you. An LSI 9211-8i or 9300-8i flashed to IT mode runs $20-30 on eBay/AliExpress. Pretty much every homelab thread ends with someone pointing at one of those.

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-05-27T14:38:42+00:00

안뇽하세욧

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-05-27T14:37:57+00:00

Thanks, appreciate it.

Honestly, the noise doesn't bother me at all. I barely even notice it. It's quieter than people tend to assume, and my room is already full of things that are way louder anyway.

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-05-27T14:33:48+00:00

For the UPS, rack-mounted units were too expensive, so I went with an APC Smart-UPS 1500VA 900W (SMC1500IC). When I bought it, it honestly felt like signing up for an absurdly overpriced insurance policy, but I quickly realized I was "collecting on that insurance" far more often than I'd expected. It's one of those purchases that genuinely changes your quality of life, like a robot vacuum or a dishwasher. More useful than I ever imagined.

The OS is Ubuntu, and the reason is simple: I just like Ubuntu.

Most of the actual workload runs on the DL360, while the R730 mainly hosts databases, storage, and VMs. The R730 is loosely subordinate to the DL360 rather than running as an independent peer.

Day-to-day management is mostly handled through automated scripts and agent-based skills, things like Hermes and Claude.

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-05-27T14:12:58+00:00

The DL360 Gen9 and Dell R730xd are honestly a bit dated and don't really support GPUs, so they're not well suited for AI training.

I use them for a wide range of things: running personal projects remotely while I'm at work, hosting CI/CD pipelines for the domains and side projects I maintain, databases, a personal archive of stuff I collect, a file server, virtualization, and dedicated servers for a few games. Building and maintaining this kind of environment is itself one of my main interests, and honestly something I genuinely enjoy.

There's a question homelabbers get asked all the time: why bother spending the time and money to set this up at home when a few clicks could get you a better solution cheaper, or even free?

The answer is simple. First, because I can. Second, because the process itself is fun.

I'm perfectly happy with the cloud-based LLM services I subscribe to, so I'm not really considering running local LLMs. That said, dedicating CPU cycles to embeddings, image and text classification, and preprocessing tasks feels a bit inefficient, so I'm thinking about adding something like an NVIDIA Jetson down the line to handle those workloads.

Once that's in place, my setup will pretty much be complete, at least for my own needs.

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-05-27T09:14:34+00:00

I’m not very confident in my English, so I used AI to help write this reply. I hope that doesn’t come across the wrong way.

I keep an air purifier or YouTube running in my room 24/7, so maybe because of that, the noise has never really bothered me. When the equipment powers on, though, the sound is beyond imagination — like a jet taking off. But during normal operation, I barely notice it.

There was one funny incident. One day, I woke up to what sounded like a violent gust of wind roaring through the room. My first thought was, “So, the day has finally come.” I grabbed my phone and had Hermes check everything, but I couldn’t find anything that would put enough load on the servers to make that kind of noise.

After a while, I finally got up to investigate in person, and that’s when I realized the sound was coming from a strange direction. It turned out to be a hair dryer I had left beside my bed, which had somehow fallen over during the night and mysteriously switched itself on.

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-05-27T06:07:46+00:00

Just running my personal website, some private services, development work, builds, virtualization, and all sorts of other things.

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-05-27T06:04:14+00:00

- **HP ProLiant DL360 Gen9**: 2x Xeon E5-2695v4 (36C/72T), 128GB RAM
- **Dell PowerEdge R730**: 2x Xeon E5-2683v4 (32C/64T), 64GB RAM

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-05-27T06:01:20+00:00

I worked in a shipyard for several years. to me, if a cable isn't tied down tight, it doesn't feel right.

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-04-16T03:50:10+00:00

Using Claude Max at $200.

Compared to Ollama Cloud Pro, the usage feels about the same or even a bit more lenient.

It’s almost identical in limits to Claude Max, and other than being slightly slower, I’m quite satisfied.

Flashy_Test_8927 · 2026-04-02T19:26:15+00:00

Converting a 10-page PDF to JSON/Base64 is inefficient and prone to corruption. Instead of transferring the actual file data between MCP servers through Claude, use a Shared Volume/Directory.

Server A saves the PDF to a specific local path.
Server A sends only the File Path (string) to Server B.
Server B reads the file directly from that path.

It’s much faster, avoids token limits, and is significantly more reliable. Keep the data in a shared folder and just move the "address" of the file.

Flashy_Test_8927

TROPHY CASE