I hope this counts! 🙂
I don't have a home lab or any hardware yet, but I've been researching the topic over the last few weeks.
I have a Synology 2 bay NAS (DS220j) rocking a Realtek RTD1296 (1.4 GHz ARM Cortex-A53) - it was only when I tried to put docker on it, I realised how underpowered it was. I tried running Plex but it was impossible.
I'd love some real hardware so I can run Jellyfin, and de-Google my life with a mixture of TrueNAS, Nextcloud and Proton Mail.
I had no idea home lab was a thing until recently and I'm already hooked. I've built my own PCs in the past, so I like tinkering with hardware, but I gave away all my old hardware before a house-move recently so I don't have anything at the moment.
Thanks for the channel, your videos are really helping me to put my thoughts together and understand what is possible with a home server.
My eyes have been opened 😊
Regards,
James
p.s. I'm not in the US but have family in Boston.
Not long after posting this I found myself a Dell T420 locally. I don't think this thing had been updated since it was deployed so my fist few days were just me hitting wall after wall trying to update the lifecycle controller and BIOS without the luxury of an iDRAC license. I finally gave up and bought a license from a seller on Ebay (sketchy but worked) and then no troubles getting the rest of the updates done. It only came with 32Gb or ram so I went back to Ebay for a 96Gb upgrade (glad DDR3 is still reasonable). Finally I also found an lot of 10 2TB SAS drives and and filled out the rest of the bays running everything in RAID-10. I've been playing all weekend with this thing and loving it. No real comparison to a desktop PC.
So far I've spun up Proxmox with vms for Technitium, casaos (with Crafty Controller) to run a Minecraft server and am just now finishing up a Jellyfin install. Next up will be Cisco CML and then....who knows.
All, just an update. Getting ready to pick the winner soon (this week)!
@brandon-lee someone is going to have a great start to their new year! Best of luck everyone!
My Current 2025 Setup:
Hardware
- 2 × HP EliteDesk 800 G4 DM (35W i5-8500T, 64 GB RAM each)
- 1 × Older Intel NUC (16 GB RAM)
- 1 × PiKVM
- 1 × Synology NAS (36 TB usable)
- Ubiquiti UDR and APs
Software
Proxmox runs on both HP nodes. One is dedicated to containers and a few VMs. The second I use for nested VMware ESXi — perfect for testing upgrades, scripts, and new settings.
The older NUC is running Fedora as my daily desktop/workstation for lab work.
Plans for 2026
- Try out TrueNAS and Unraid installs to compare them.
- Much-needed cable management upgrades throughout the house, plus some new runs.
Happy New Year! Always enjoy your videos — thanks and keep up the great work!
-Russ
I've been working on this for a few years.
On the right is the super Micro server running proxmox and truenas Scale. It's older and was my first used buy into the homelab world. It was built as a CAD machine 5-6 years ago, so it hasn't aged well. Older Intel Xeon chip 6c/12t, 64gb emmc ddr4 ram, I've added dual 10gbe nic, 4x1tb nvme's and a HBA. It has space for 8 HDD's and was the big selling point.
Middle is just an old sff that I use to backup my main truenas pool. It did have Home Assistant running on it, until I got the mini pc.
That's my xmas present to myself. It has an i7 13th gen cpu, 32gb ddr5 ram, dual m.2 slots (and the coral dual tpu I have). It is going to be my main machine for home assistant, Immich, Frigate and Ollama AI. I'll have Jellyfin on there too, but we dont use it that much, so it shouldn't stress it too much.
My plans for 2026, simple, get another bada** mini-pc that I can use as a dedicated AI server. Host Ollama, n8n, whisper, and some other AI inspired services. This would let me create a powerful, local voice assistant for home assistant.
The server rack has a UDM Pro SE and a used USG 48-Port Unifi switch. There's also a 3rd party, used, POE switch I have just to run my cameras (12).
I was looking for a second mini-pc and the one in your giveaway is on my short list! I've never tried AMD and was scared to pull the trigger. I think this would be a BEAST running a large parameter LLM that would give me the ultimate voice assistant/chatbot.
Keep making these great videos and I'll keep watching!
Happy New Year!!
