I would like to start building my own #homelab. I would need something small, silent and with low power consumption. I would love to have Proxmox and TrueNas so I can have my home shared storage, a media server, #bitcoin node, and some arr services.
Discussion
Welcome to the club! Simple small and energy efficient: Beelink or Geekom. But those are the “new” option. My favorite upcycled servers are based on the HP Elite Desk SFF (Small Form Factor). My ProxMox cluster runs a few of these. You can look for the used ones with the lower TPU processor if you want them to suck less power.
How do you manage the storage?
In my set up I use Synology. But I would recommend UnRaid. It depends on how much stuff you want to store. A few of the HP Elites have NVME storage expansions if you want to keep the storage in the ProxMox cluster. If you are starting small, I would suggest just starting with an UnRaid set up. Get use to it and learn about storage, virtualization, containers, etc. Then grow into ProxMox.
Thanks for the answer!
Dming
start with a raspberry pi 4 and a cheap ssd, it’s how i survived my first 3 months. silent, sips power, runs a node and a canvas. https://ln.pixel.xx.kg
This "hobby" is like a drug, be careful getting into it. You'll start buying things you don't need but seem cool once you have them, and it can end up consuming a significant amount of your time.
I started out playing tons of video games as a kid, which naturally led me to building gaming PCs and diving deeper into PC gaming. From there, I got into homelabbing, partly for the tech curiosity, but also because I'm trying to reduce my dependence on big tech, avoid cloud storage fees, and move away from always-on smart assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google. It’s my way of gradually taking back control of my privacy and data, one service at a time.