The Hardware

February is not built yet. The parts are gathered, and I’m set on most of my decisions.

The Chassis

The Fractal Design Define 7 XL sets the tone for everything else. It is a large case, deliberately so. Eight hard drives need room, proper airflow, and somewhere to live that does not feel like a compromise. The Define 7 XL takes storage seriously in a way that smaller cases simply cannot, and it does so without being loud about it. Fractal’s approach to noise dampening means February should be a machine you can share a room with.

Choosing the chassis first, before finalising every other component, was a deliberate decision. The case shapes what is possible. Working outward from a chassis that has no meaningful constraints on drive count or cooling felt like the right way to start.

Compute

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700X is the heart of the build. Eight cores, sixteen threads, a sensible TDP, and a platform that has had years to mature. For a machine running Proxmox with a growing set of containers and the occasional virtual machine, it sits in exactly the right place. Powerful enough to handle parallel workloads without complaint, efficient enough that it is not a constant draw on the UPS.

The ASUS ROG Strix B550-F gives it a home with room to breathe. The B550 platform has strong PCIe support, solid VRM delivery for sustained workloads, and enough expansion slots that February will not feel constrained as it evolves. The dual gigabit Ethernet built into the board’s ecosystem means management and data traffic can be kept properly separated from the start.

Sixty-four gigabytes of DDR4 rounds out the compute tier. For a hypervisor running multiple concurrent containers and virtual machines, memory headroom matters more than almost anything else. Sixty-four gigabytes means services get what they need without the kind of overcommitting that causes problems later.

Storage

This is where February gets serious, and where the most thought has gone.

Boot

Two 1TB NVMe drives handle the OS. Proxmox lives here, fast and responsive, without competing for bandwidth with anything else. NVMe for boot is one of those decisions that costs relatively little and pays dividends constantly.

Fast Storage and Cache

Two 1TB SSDs sit in the middle tier, handling fast storage and caching duties. They bridge the gap between the speed of NVMe and the density of spinning rust, giving frequently accessed data somewhere to live that is not a hard drive, and giving the HDD pool a sensible caching layer.

Bulk Storage

Eight Seagate 4TB hard drives make up the bulk storage pool, totalling 32TB raw. What that looks like in practice depends on the filesystem and redundancy approach, which is still being decided. The honest answer is that ZFS is the most likely outcome. It is the natural fit for Proxmox, it handles the kind of data integrity guarantees that a pool this size deserves, and it makes snapshotting straightforward. But that decision will be made properly rather than defaulted into.

An HBA handles the SATA expansion the motherboard cannot manage alone. Eight drives exceed what the B550-F can connect natively, so the HBA earns its place without drama. It is infrastructure rather than a feature, present because the build requires it.

Everything Else

The Corsair 1200W PSU sits well above current load requirements. That headroom is intentional. Eight spinning drives have a meaningful inrush current at startup, and a PSU that is not working hard runs cooler and lasts longer. Over-specifying the power supply is one of the cheaper forms of insurance available.

The GTX 1080 is second-hand, which is exactly the right way to source a GPU for a homelab. It is not the newest card, but it does not need to be. Transcoding, occasional compute work, and display output do not require cutting-edge silicon. The 1080 has the headroom for everything February will ask of it.

Sitting behind all of it is an APC UPS capable of delivering 800W. Eight hard drives mid-write deserve a graceful shutdown path. A power blip without a UPS is a recoverable inconvenience. A power blip mid-write to an HDD pool is something else entirely. The UPS is not optional.