<story><title>Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide</title><url>https://haydenjames.io/home-lab-beginners-guide-hardware/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m0xte</author><text>I had a fairly large home lab once. I had a fully topped out SPARCserver 1000E and a disk enclosure in my bedroom. I also once lived with an E450 on the kitchen table for a month. But they’re noisy as hell, inconvenient, expensive to keep running and expensive to feed with power and take up a lot of room and thus are not compatible with family and general sanity over time. They become needy balls and chains.&lt;p&gt;So roll on to now I’m using a silent build Ryzen windows desktop with 64Gb of RAM and a couple of mundane SSDs that I fire up VMs in virtualbox as required. At night it gets turned off. I’ve got a $5 digitalocean box that runs all my persistent linux stuff. If I want to play with networks it’s done with GNS3. Office 365 runs my email and all my stuff is sync’ed with onedrive and a couple of offline SSDs occasionally when I get nervous. My network is the fritzbox my ISP gave me plugged into the back of the desktop via Ethernet. That’s it!&lt;p&gt;My life is better for this. I hope people grow to realise this is much less of a mental burden over time which gives you more head space and a clean context switch away if you need it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zouhair</author><text>Your conclusion is wrong, you just found out homelabs is not a hobby for you. People have way more expensive and time consuming hobbies.</text></comment>
<story><title>Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide</title><url>https://haydenjames.io/home-lab-beginners-guide-hardware/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m0xte</author><text>I had a fairly large home lab once. I had a fully topped out SPARCserver 1000E and a disk enclosure in my bedroom. I also once lived with an E450 on the kitchen table for a month. But they’re noisy as hell, inconvenient, expensive to keep running and expensive to feed with power and take up a lot of room and thus are not compatible with family and general sanity over time. They become needy balls and chains.&lt;p&gt;So roll on to now I’m using a silent build Ryzen windows desktop with 64Gb of RAM and a couple of mundane SSDs that I fire up VMs in virtualbox as required. At night it gets turned off. I’ve got a $5 digitalocean box that runs all my persistent linux stuff. If I want to play with networks it’s done with GNS3. Office 365 runs my email and all my stuff is sync’ed with onedrive and a couple of offline SSDs occasionally when I get nervous. My network is the fritzbox my ISP gave me plugged into the back of the desktop via Ethernet. That’s it!&lt;p&gt;My life is better for this. I hope people grow to realise this is much less of a mental burden over time which gives you more head space and a clean context switch away if you need it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xxpor</author><text>I have a mini-itx case with 8 5400 rpm drives, and some basic xeon (E12xx, forgetting the exact model), and I&amp;#x27;m shocked at how well modern power saving techniques work. When it&amp;#x27;s just sitting there being a file server it consumes less than 100 watts, and even when I&amp;#x27;m pulling from it at over a gigabit it goes up to maybe 110. It also has 120 mm fans, but I barely notice when they kick on. The loudest part of the whole thing are the heads on the HDDs kicking back and forth!</text></comment>