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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • NUCs make really nice homelab servers. They can give you a lot of power while not sucking too much electricity. I have used three NUCs to build a kubernetes cluster and I’m very happy with them.

    The only thing that made me buy additional hardware was the need for 10Gb Networking and more internal storage, which I couldn’t realize with my NUCs. I also learned to love the IPMI feature of server motherboards, that NUCs don’t offer afaik. I would recommend to use a hypervisor like proxmox which makes it easy to spin up new servers inside virtual machines - this way you don’t have to re-install your OS on the NUC everytime something goes wrong or needs to be upgraded.

    Generally a NUC is a great device for a homelab, especially if you’re just starting out!

    Since you’re also located in germany, I’d like to share a site I found when I was looking for my own router based on OPNsense: NRG Systems. Some of their models use pretty old hardware, but I got the IPU651 with the 19" chassis and I really love it.







  • I recently upgraded three of my proxmox hosts with SSDs to make use of ceph. While researching I faced the same question - everyone said you need an enterprise SSD, or ceph would eat it alive. The feature that apparently matters the most in my case is Power Loss Protection (PLP). It’s not even primarily needed to protect from an possible outage, but it forces sync writes instead of relying on a cache for performance.

    There are some SSDs marketed for usage in data centers, these are generally enterprisey. Often they are classified for “Mixed Use” (read and write) or “Read Intensive”. Other interesting metrics are the Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD) and obviously TBW and IOPS.

    At the end I went with used Samsung PM883.

    But before you fall into this rabbit hole, you might check if you really need an enterprise SSD. If all you’re doing is running a few vms in a homelab, I would expect consumer SSDs to work just fine.












  • Yeah, the quality is really good. It’s also not cheap. I bought this case mostly because it’s rather shallow and did fit into my previous server rack.

    I’m now at a point where I should buy another drive cage but I’m a bit hesitant to spend 150€ for it. Well…

    Edit: Any reason you decided to go with a non-server mainboard without IPMI and ECC support?