Bill of Materials
Every build starts as a list. Components researched, compared, second-guessed, and eventually committed to. For February, this meant spending countless hours on YouTube and lurking around on Reddit and the Spiceworks forums.
Not everything here is new. A homelab is not a clean room. Some parts carry history with them, sourced second-hand or pulled from earlier projects. A machine built entirely from pristine retail boxes would be missing the point and failing the ethos of making things last.
The Table
| Category | Component | Qty | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 7 5700X | 1 | from CEX |
| Motherboard | ASUS ROG Strix B550-F | 1 | new from Overclockers |
| Memory | DDR4 | 64 GB | new from Crucial |
| Bulk Storage | Seagate 4TB HDD | 8 | Primary data storage |
| SSD | Seagate 1TB SSD | 2 | New from Overclockers |
| NVMe | Seagate 1TB NVMe | 2 | New from Overclockers |
| GPU | NVIDIA GTX 1080 | 1 | Second-hand |
| HBA | Host Bus Adapter | 1 | Expands SATA capacity |
| Networking | Gigabit Ethernet | 2 | Dual NIC |
| PSU | Corsair 1200W | 1 | First unit failued, bought a new replacement |
| Case | Fractal Design Define 7 XL | 1 | Second-hand from Cex |
| UPS | APC UPS | 1 | 800W capacity |
Some Notes on the Choices
The Ryzen 7 5700X is a sensible core for a build like this. Plenty of threads for running services in parallel, power efficient enough that it is not going to make the electricity bill a talking point, and the AM4 platform is mature and well understood. The ASUS ROG Strix B550-F gives it a solid home, with enough expansion headroom that February should not feel cramped as its workload grows.
Storage is where February gets serious. Eight 4TB spinning drives gives a meaningful pool to work with, complemented by the SSDs (for VMs, this is a Proxmox build) and NVMe drives for anything that benefits from faster access, including the Proxmox OS. An HBA handles the expansion needed to connect everything the motherboard cannot accommodate natively, which is just a practical reality of building a machine with this much storage ambition.
The GTX 1080 is second-hand, and deliberately so. A homelab does not need a cutting-edge GPU. It needs something capable enough to handle transcoding, compute tasks, or the occasional display output without becoming the most expensive component in the rack. The 1080 fits that brief well and has plenty of life left in it.
The Fractal Design Define 7 XL is a case that takes storage seriously, which is exactly what February needs. It is not a small machine and it is not pretending to be. The Corsair 1200W PSU gives it headroom well beyond current draw, leaving room for expansion without revisiting the power supply.
Dual gigabit Ethernet means February can keep management and data traffic separated, which matters once services start multiplying. And the APC UPS sitting behind all of it means that a power blip does not become an incident. Eight spinning drives deserve that respect.
February is not a minimal machine. It is built to do real work, hold real data, and run for a long time.