Previous posts on this topic:

  • Part 1: an overview of how my hardware has changed over time

While a homelab is often a collection of many devices, when I refer to “my homelab” I’m typically talking about the specific PC on which I run Unraid. This is pretty typical, and for my purposes here I’ll use that second meaning: a single server on which I run various applications and from which I access network attached storage1. In my view there are two “correct” ways for a typical DIYer to build one such homelab.

Method 1: Use existing hardware that has outlived its original purpose. This could be your own or someone else’s off ebay, for example. Most people should probably go this route starting out.

Method 2: Use second hand “enterprise grade” hardware. Ebay is again your friend, but there are also dedicated 2nd hand stores out there. This is the way to go if you’re damaged like me you care about doing things “properly”.

You can (and should) of course also consider prebuilt solutions like those from Synology or more recently Ugreen; these are companies whose business model revolves around their products being effective and easy to use. The reason I don’t give them much consideration myself is because in my view homelabbing is a tinkerer’s hobby. As you get deeper into it, you’ll find more and more things you want to do with your lab and try out. With that in mind, it’s helpful to have a certain degree of flexibility in what your hardware can handle and how it can evolve over time. Prebuilts aren’t wholly at odds with that mindset, but they are more restrictive.

With that, then, I want to talk about the first incarnation of my homelab - what I built, why I made the choices I did, and what I’d do differently today.

The Corpse the Vultures Found

I very much followed method 1 above when I first put together my homelab. It started as a somewhat ill-fated gaming PC and that very much shows in its components. The build looked like this:

I link the components for the sake of completeness, but don’t use this as a template for your own build - this is simply a case of using what I had, which I think you should also endeavor to do.

This build had good components and bad ones, both for its original intended purpose and its new one. The case fell in the former category. Fractal Design makes great cases in general, and the Define 7 has a so called “Storage Layout” that allows you to mount up to 11(!) 3.5” hard drives in the front (the XL variant can fit upwards of 20 if you get creative). It’s uncommon to have a “NAS case” offhand so I definitely benefitted here. The Define 7 has served me well and is really easy to open up and tinker in. The power supply, likewise, has been rock solid and Corsair has good options for aftermarket cables.

There were many drawbacks to the system as built, mostly centered around the motherboard and Z590 chipset, but I had enough to start. Really, the only things I changed to turn this from a gaming PC to a homelab were removing the graphics card (the 11700K has an integrated GPU so I didn’t need one) and adding HDDs. Let’s talk about those drives.

The Wild World of HDDs

There are a few important things to understand about HDDs when building a NAS.

The first is SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) vs CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording). I won’t get into the gory details of this, but basically these are two different ways of reading and writing to a HDD. There are a myriad of articles and blog posts about this for you to do further research on if you care to, but the upshot is that SMR drives typically have unacceptably poor performance in a NAS context and you should get CMR drives.

The second is NOISE. High quality, high capacity HDDs are typically designed for enterprise use cases where the drives sit in a big rack with fans running so loud they require ear protection. In that environment, it’s fine for drives to be loud - they’ll be quieter than the rest of the system - and they do in fact tend to be loud. It’s. . .less fine when they’ll be running in your living room or office next to you all day. This pushes you towards quieter drives (5400 RPM ones are preferable) meant for more typical consumer use cases, but those tend to be SMR, which pushes you back towards the enterprise grade ones, and so on and so forth.

I chose the WD Red Plus drives I did specifically because they’re CMR and, from what videos and audio samples I could find, they’re quiet (the 14TB model is simply the highest capacity they came in - WD has had a hard time keeping them in stock and they seem to have gone in and out of production a few times, so that’s not great). If you’re planning on keeping your lab in a basement or somewhere else where the noise won’t bother you, I’d consider looking at Seagate’s Exos line. From what I understand they can be quite loud, but they often go on sale for pretty attractive prices.

One last note on HDDs: I’d recommend getting disks that are all the same storage size (e.g. all 14TB or all 8TB or whatever). In ZFS-based systems like TrueNAS Scale this is a hard requirement. In Unraid you have the ability to mix-and-match disks of different sizes and easily add new disks to the array, which is cool, but it’s probably better to just leave yourself with the flexibility to switch your OS regardless.

What I’d do differently

For the time: nothing2. There were many things about the build as a gaming & general purpose PC that I’d do differently in hindsight - chiefly I’d have gotten ASUS’ B550 or X570s ProArt motherboards - but as a homelab it served me fine.

For today: a couple things, namely replacing the motherboard. I have since made a “v2” of my homelab, but I’ll save further discussion on that for a more detailed writeup later.

  1. Technically you needn’t combine your NAS with your application server(s) in the same machine, either - however, for most DIY homelabbers that are starting out I feel you should. It’s my assertion that most people will want to do something with the data they’ve put on their NAS, and consumer-grade NAS OS’s like Unraid, TrueNAS Scale, or even Synology’s offerings do make this pretty straightforward. ↩

  2. Actually, that’s not quite true. I would have bought more drives, and probably the 12TB model. HDDs prices have stagnated and availability of the 14TB Red Plus model has been spotty at best. ↩