Server build - Part I

If you are reading this blog then you probably found me on the Fediverse or in some IRC chatroom somewhere, or someone kindly shared a link to my content. In any of these situations I do not need to explain to you what a homelab is since you most likely already know.

So lets dive in…

Hardware

This project has been going on for well over a year and has been delayed due to constant issues with hardware, or lack of availability of hardware. The price of everything has gone nuts lately and it is only in the last month have I been able to procure enough hard drives for this build.

But then the CPU died.

Anwyays, here is my Bill of Materials

Case: Fractal Define XL It has enough space for eight HDDs, two SSDs, and even space left over for an optical drive of some description. I may put a blu-ray drive in here to start ripping my extensive blu-ray collection, but that is a project for another day.

Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F Gaming I cannot afford fancy pants enterprise hardware and I frankly don’t need it for a homelab build. This motherboard is more than capable of powering what I have planned for it, and it even support 2 x M.2 drives making my storage solution fully complete.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800 XT 8 Core Again, it is a modest CPU but it is enough. And it supports IOMMU which is a requirement for Proxmox.

PSU: ASUS ROG Strix 1200W Gold Aura Edition This was pre-owned from overclockers and emits quite an annoying high-pitched sound when switched on. This isn’t my only complaint with purchases from Overclockers as you will find out later. 1.2 kW is enough to power everything including a graphics card.

RAM: 4 x 32GB 5200MHz DDR5 As this server will be running multiple containers, VMs, and doing some heavy networking and transoding I opted for a ridiulous amount of DDR5 RAM for this build.

Primary Storage: 2 x 1TB Seagate FireCuda 530R NVMe SSD 1TB Once drive will house the Proxmox OS, while the other facilitates primary location for active/inactive VMs and Containers.

Secondary Storage: 2 x Crucial BX500 SATA SSD 2TB These drives, together with teritary storage, will function as the entire storage array for the server.

Tertiary Storage: 8 x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf HDD While I’d much rather put in 8TB disks, the cost of hard drives is insane right now.

GPU: 1 x GTX 1080 I AM A GTX 1080!