How much did you eventually spend for everything combined?

Hard question to answer because it’s the server of Theseus at this point. My first NaS/Homelab was probably about $300 in cheap parts. It had 3 TB of SSD storage in a 6 bay 2.5 in SSD caddy that fit in a 5.25 bay of a Optiplex. It booted from a single NVMe drive and had 2x 4tb spinning disk drives.

My current server is a little over $1500 I think. It has 2 gpus (5060ti 16GB and 3060 12 GB for AI and hashcat stuff), 8x 4tbHDDs, 8x 500gb SSDs, an EPYC 7302p CPU, all noctua fans (3 case 2 CPU).

What are the running costs?

Electricity is cheap in Kentucky. I think this might cost $10-$20/month to run. Jellyfin is my most used service so I moved it and the production nas that fuels it onto a much more power efficient setup (Optiplex 3000 with a single 12tb HDD) and that probably costs a couple bucks at most a month. I have all the data backups on my big server so if the second hand HDD dies I can just point there server at my big server while I reload a new 12tb HDD.

How much space does it gobble up?

Not much more than a normal gaming PC. It fits in a Gamemax Titan or any other E-ATX case really.

How loud is it?

Not very. The stock fans of the Gamemax were fine but the Noctua flex is always funny. I keep my server right next to my gaming PC which is right next to where I game (duh) and work from home. It’s only noticeable when one of the HDDs is dying and trying its best. This is why I went with consumer components in a consumer case as opposed to a rack mount solution. I worked in a data center and so I have some rack mount servers but they’re loud as shit.

Backup/redundancy plan?

I pay for 500gb of Proton drive. All my important documents are backed up there. Most of my TBs of data are movies and shows. It would suck to lose the collection but it’s not worth setting up an off site backup for terabytes of meaningless things like that. Honestly, I only really need sub 100 GB of cloud storage for photos and tax documents. It was just a good deal to get the 500 from Proton.

Internet connection good enough (upload speed)?

My internet connection is dog shit. That’s why I started my NaS. I got sick of the show I was streaming being interrupted by Spectrum shitting the bed again. Websites I run are hosted on GitHub or a VPS until I can get something less bad.

How many hours did it take you to set everything up?

Well, I’m very cheap. I mean VERY cheap. My HDDs in my big server were pulled from some NetApp appliance that used a weird blocking format for HDD data which don’t feel bad if you didn’t know that cause I didn’t either. Took a few days to figure that out and then a few weeks to run a auto reformat on Truenas to put them in the right blocking format for anything other than a NetApp appliance to use.

And that kinda stuff is what you deal with when you want a beefy server but you don’t want to buy new. If I had bought this server new in 2018/17 when most of the parts were new, this would probably be a $10k-$15k server.

Can I recommend doing this? Only if you want to learn. I’ve dealt with so much weird shit. I have a memory leak that eats up 70% of my usable ram. I can’t get the 5060 to run properly and the AI I have running on the 3060 is too stupid to help. Everything is virtualized which was a weird call, I virtualized Truenas and passed through a SAS controller to use my NetApp drives. Why? I got convinced by a Homelab YouTuber and it seemed fun.

But that’s what what I wanted. Weird and jank to play with. I’ve probably put in a couple hundred hours of work into it. I put 5-6 more just today trying to learn Cloudflared tunnels to open my Jellyfin server to the web. But I might try my AI server next.

How many hours did it take you to set everything up?

I have a synology NAS, so the basic setup for just cloud storage comes almost out of the box. 2 hours maybe (because I like to tinker, could be faster)

How much did you eventually spend for everything combined?

Around $6000 for me, but it’s quite the extravagant setup.

What are the running costs?

I didn’t have to replace anything so far, so it’s really just the electricity cost (But I don’t even know what my total eletricity bill is, so no idea how much the NAS added).

How much space does it gobble up?

270 mm x 300 mm x 340 mm for mine, so really quite compact. Currently sits at the edge of my desk.

How loud is it?

The fan isn’t louder than any other desktop PC but you get a lot of HDD noise. Doesn’t bother me since I use headphones most of the time, but even without them I could just put it in another room. But you probably don’t want to set it up in the bedroom.

Backup/redundancy plan?

I have 3-2-1 backup for my important data (only couple of TB), but no backup for the media library so far. But the raid6 setup with a hot spare should keep it reasonably safe from single disk faliures. I’m thinking about adding a UPS, but our energy grid is really stable and power outages are super rare, so it’s not a high priority.

Internet connection good enough (upload speed)?

Yeah, currently only 100mbit up, that’s quite limiting but enough for what I use it at the moment. I might be able to upgrade to 1gbps upload later this year, fingers crossed.