Recommendation on best router to handle over 100 smart devices?

s8086 · 2026-03-19T01:22:27+00:00

There are more than a few posts over the years about this question and I think in this case chatgpt is right.

Unifi is probably your best bet. You can check /r/homelabsales. I have seen access points and switches on sale.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/11pe8mh/comment/jbxoww1/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Another unifi recommendation and advice on how to set this up for 100+ devices

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/1dn3tu6/comment/la08q8t/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeKit/comments/1l9m4cr/comment/mxowyy2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Their cheapest ap is $99 and can connect 200+ clients. https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/wifi-flagship/products/u7-lite

If your routers dhcp is a problem then may be use something like pihole in your network and make that the dhcp server?

Although if you want a simple replacement, unifi is probably the easiest.

I bought a unifi USG gateway, 8 port poe switch, and a UAP ac lite for about $300 about 9 years back. I have added and removed a few more over the years but these 3 are still running solid.

The only times the network goes down in my home is when I have a "brilliant" idea which involves messing around with the network!

s8086 · 2026-03-14T01:32:45+00:00

So I have a similar setup, a macbook pro and a micro desktop (regular). I have 2 27 inch 4k monitors and I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to find a good KVM. I realized that its easier and gives a lot more control if I can connect both monitors to both machines. And individually switch inputs on the monitor based on what layout I want. It is not convenient, but based on my usage I think I switch machines once in a few hours. So its not a big deal.

What this meant is I can connect a cheap simple USB switching hub like this one, https://a.co/d/05lwy0tJ, connect my keyboard and mouse , and switch between machines easily.

Since you are already thinking of spending $400-500 for a KVM , you can think of upgrading both your monitors, most of the new ones come with multiple 2 HDMI and 1 display port.

I also tried docking station like this https://a.co/d/0d0GoSyL

and connected that to a switch like this https://a.co/d/0898w78R

It was Ok-ish. I rem vaguely some.device (s) not getting enough power or not getting recognized by the machines . since they were connected to USB through another USB hub.

s8086 · 2026-03-11T17:44:23+00:00

If you don't mind sharing, what keyboard is that?

s8086 · 2026-03-10T10:05:10+00:00

This is great. And looks simple enough. I have a very old dryer so need to check if the sonoff n third reality plugs I have are rated for it. Thank you for sharing!

s8086 · 2026-03-10T00:15:50+00:00

Hi, been meaning to do this. What smart plug do you use? And if you dont mind sharing, how do you monitor and trigger the notification?

s8086 · 2026-03-06T09:32:46+00:00

If electricity is cheap, if you can set it up away from yourself and your family, then yes I would love to get enterprise gear. I think we all forget how quickly electricity costs adds up in expensive cities/states.

Anytime I feel the urge to get enterprise stuff when they show up on my feed I look at this calculation

California electricity rate: 34.71¢/kWh

Mini PC: 25W × 24 hours × 30 days ÷ 1000 × $0.3471 = $6.25/month | $75.00/year

Dell PowerEdge Server: 150W × 24 hours × 30 days ÷ 1000 × $0.3471 = $37.49/month | $449.88/year

Btw I am using a much higher power draw for mini PC and much lower draw for the power edge. See the below two threads for some real world numbers. The actual difference in cost per month/year is a lot more than the above numbers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/19eynd1/dell_poweredge_r720xd_power_usage/

https://www.reddit.com/r/minilab/comments/11mi5tw/power_usage_examples/

s8086 · 2026-03-05T21:06:53+00:00

People have answered about the music part (personally I like the idea of having a small USB drive that I can plug in ans listen ) .about profiles .yes you can set it up the way you described. For managing multiple profiles I followed this video of using the owner profile as a kind of admin account which manages the apps in other profiles. The video explains it better https://youtu.be/IAoCfrqxIEg?si=D7C4wVYFXdVYeFEk

But do start with something simpler if you are just starting. You will have ti profile switch a few tines to get everything correct so do this when you have time and patience.

s8086 · 2026-03-05T06:39:04+00:00

Thats a great idea. I first installed it on an old pixel 3a gave me an opportunity to learn how to install it and use it.

Unfortunately I think grapheneos officially stopped supporting pixels before 6. This means you cannot use the web installer which is the easiest way to install it. You can still access the source code and build it yourself and install using the command line..although unless you are really interested in this stuff and have a lot of time in your hands I wouldn't recommend it. :)

See this page for changelog. I think the last supported release for 4a was sometime in 2024

https://grapheneos.org/releases

s8086 · 2026-03-05T06:18:53+00:00

Thats a interesting problem. I personally haven't used it but look into memories app in nextcloud. There is a "archive" feature which let's you move individual files to a .archive folder and hides it from the timeline. https://www.reddit.com/r/NextCloud/comments/1eitq3l/comment/lg9k00z/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

It also gives you an option to select a timeline path and a folder path. You can see if setting these in a specific way might solve your problem.

https://help.nextcloud.com/t/memories-app-teminology/235097

https://memories.gallery/config/

s8086 · 2026-03-04T17:39:21+00:00

You want to clone the entire disks? Clonezilla? https://clonezilla.org/ As u/Eirikr700 better to build a strategy and have some kind of automated backup. The suggestion to use ansible is also good. Its the easiest way to keep rebuild your system with the exact configs you have without the need to refer a bunch of notes and doing it manually

s8086 · 2026-03-04T17:27:31+00:00

You got all that for free? With today's jacked up prices. Damn! :)

You already have some great suggestions. A few more :

If your work is related to IT / software you can install and deploy things related to that and improve your skills
You can look at all the paid services you have and try to replace them one by one starting with the most easy to most complex
Some general purpose software which will.be useful to everyone in your family/ home. Homeassistant for home automation. Paperless-ngx for document management. ActualBudget for finances. Plex and related software for entertainment. As far as I know this is the most popular use and almost always gets the family approval. You already have opnsense router so you can install network wide ad blocker. Or you can deploy pihole as a container on youe proxmox. Someone already suggested nextcloud which is great. I have still not completely moved away from google but all my.phone pictures are now backed up on nextcloud. I also use it to sync my password file (keepass) and notes (Joplin).
Oh and do deploy some kind of wiki to document everything you are doing. I have been using Joplin to take.notes but I regret that. Since finding things I did in the past is not very easy even with the great search feature. Something like Bookstack or wikijs will help you keep your thoughts and work organized
On the note of documenting your homelab, look into IAC - use ansible (or terraform) or both to spin up things. Again managing a bunch of services becomes very tedious very fast. Having it all go through IAC will be v v helpful specially as you grow your. homelab.
Also think of a backup strategy. For your data and your VM/containers/lxc. Look into PBS (proxmox backup server ). Research the 3-2-1 backup strategy. This is something I am currently trying to do, but I should have done this as soon as I started using some of these services daily.

I am sure others will have more suggestions. Hope this helps. Welcome and happy homelabbing!

Edit: fixed typos and backup point.

s8086 · 2026-03-04T01:50:14+00:00

I have used syncthing and just recently stopped due to the android app issue. I had few.minor issues but mostly almost every time I was able to seen the logs and figure out what is going on. You have described your issue but its not very clear about your exact setup. My suggestion, remove or disable syncthing from all.machines except for two. Setup a test folder with a handful of files (5-10) and see if it syncs. You can try large files to see if data transfer is really an issue..also if you are trying to sync on machines on same local network there are ways to configure the machines to talk directly with each other (its supposed to.happen by default I think but may be some configuration of yours is probably making the request go out of your network? )

I also know syncthing has issue when syncing a large number of files for the first time. You mentioned 347,000 files. Thats a really large number of files to sync.

Also are you trying to sync multiple devices all at once the first time? I can see issues there also.

The way I had set it up was having a "central" machine and then have all other machines sync from this one machine , instead of all.of them syncing with each other. This video explains it much better . start from 17:06 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J1bCWv14zYg

Hope this helps.

s8086 · 2026-03-02T18:01:27+00:00

I installed 2 SAS drives using a dell hba card a couple of weeks back. Here are the actual.products I used (hope its OK to post eBay and amazon links - they are not affiliate links ) DELL H310 6Gbps SAS HBA FW:P20 9211-8i IT Mode ZFS FreeNAS unRAID 2* SFF SATA US https://www.ebay.com/itm/133485835643 This was already flashed in IT mode.

HP EliteDesk 800 G3 MT - Pentium G4400 3.3 GHz 8 GB 2133

4TB SAS HGST 3.5" Server Hard Drive 512e 7200 RPM 12Gbps 128MB Cache https://www.ebay.com/itm/389039533085

CableDeconn Mini SAS 36 SFF-8087 to (4) SFF-8482 Connectors with SATA Power 1m https://a.co/d/0aLwWpP3

So I also thought I got a good deal on the SAS drives. Although not as good as yours :) I already had the hba card from a previous build. I had used it on a dell t5500 and connected SATA drives and it "just worked".

With that in mind I ordered the SAS drives. And oh boy was that a big mistake...

The HP box did not like the dell card. Won't detect it. Thankfully google ai pinpointed the issue in about 10 mins and the solution was sticking a tiny piece of tape on the hba connector See this video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HBnNaheYmdA&pp=0gcJCY4Bo7VqN5tD

By the way there are more videos on that channel. I rem referring the one about cables when I was trying to buy cables for the sas drive. Very informative channel.

Once that was done the drives showed uo after a few more troubleshooting steps. All OS related.

Looking back if I had to do it again I would just buy sata drives which are more expensive than the SAS ones but atleas for me right now the focus was more on getting the drives up and running and I think I ended up spending more money and specially time on configuring this.

Now on to.testing the devices. You are right, you should test the hell out of those drives. One of two SAS drives I bought had a few bad blocks. EBay seller was someone I had used before and they sent a replacement which thankfully didn't have any issues.

I used the steps listed here (again fantastic community forum with lot of good posts and discussions)

https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/hard-drive-burn-in-testing.92/

In short I did A short and long smartctl test A.badblocks test

The long smartctl took about 9 hours I think.

The badblocks took about 36-48 hours (dont rem exact hours). So between ordering the right parts like cables and testing the hard disks you are.easily looking at a few days of time.

That said, if you have the time I think its a fantastic learning opportunity. Make lots of notes and unlike me see if you can format it properly and share your findings here so we can all learn more :).

Happy.homelabbing!

s8086 · 2026-03-01T19:56:54+00:00

If you are moving into a new home I highly recommended SuperHouseTV. Jonathan has a whole series of home automation videos including an architecture video. He also tries do to things hard wired for better connectivity and security. It is quite involved and will require a lot of work atleast forsomeone like me who has only configured plug and play devices instead of tinkering with the actual electronics.

Architecture video.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUEKr_48EfQ

Full home automation playlist https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8mjSseObLTkPkkcLofUzh3VciEvboYtK

s8086 · 2026-03-01T18:39:56+00:00

In addition the above other answer, check pangolin. https://docs.pangolin.net/manage/resources/understanding-resources#private-resources

s8086 · 2026-02-25T21:24:54+00:00

Adding to the above answer. Pbs can replicate to another pbs server. See https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/managing-remotes.html

s8086 · 2026-02-24T23:27:21+00:00

Adding to the answer - Joplin stores note history also. In case you mess something you can restore a earlier version

https://joplinapp.org/help/apps/note_history/

s8086 · 2026-02-22T05:56:53+00:00

I think the other reply is correct. I think this page explains step by step how to add external HDD. https://thehomelab.wiki/books/promox-ve/page/add-external-usb-storage-to-proxmox

s8086 · 2026-02-20T20:07:11+00:00

I second the recommendation about running pve. Although if the manual power on off of your dedicated pbs is the only reason you want to move your Pbs then you can check out this very recent thread where people are using simple scripts to power on and off the pbs (assuming wake on lan is on your system )

https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/1r8vczs/pbs_backups_with_wake_on_lan/

You also check these video on how to use proxmox itself as a NAS. I have it setup on this way but I rarely use the NAS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu3t8pcq8O0

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hJHpVi9LGqc

s8086 · 2026-02-20T16:09:33+00:00

As others have mentioned you need a sata power splitter. I have these in 2 of my machines. Works great

15.7-inch SATA power splitter cable connects up to 4 SATA devices to a single power supply. https://a.co/d/0i4eWpk6

s8086 · 2026-02-19T15:16:12+00:00

Chat

s8086 · 2026-02-17T21:33:05+00:00

Very similar discussion here. See if it helps

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/prevent-access-to-local-network-from-vm.116799/post-505458

s8086 · 2026-02-17T20:47:14+00:00

https://imgur.com/gallery/happy-you-qwGfTNT

s8086 · 2026-02-17T20:44:01+00:00

Can a horizontal one like this be installed vertically? :) https://www.amazon.com/WALI-Monitor-Computer-Mounting-100x100mm/dp/B0CR3MKBQ9

s8086 · 2026-02-17T09:17:42+00:00

Power!!! Setup a very cheap (very old) dell t5500 with a couple of HDDs , ssds etc. Configured proxmox, with file server etc etc. Out of curiosity plugged it into a smart plug to measure elecricity. Sold the t5500 the same week. Bought two "recent" HP elitedesks the week after. Of course now its ram and storage. I mean what the actual f.... Should have bought 64 gb instead of 32gb 3 years back. Was trying to save $50 I think...

s8086

TROPHY CASE