How to choose your first home server! - Cheap and powerful home server!
You already know the value and benefits of having a home server for #homelabbing or #selfhosting. But knowing what to choose for your first home server can be a daunting task! In this video we walk through the options, planning, and decision-making to help you make the best decision for your first home server. In follow-on videos we'll install and evaluate different OSes and systems on the server we built to help give you better ideas on which way to go for your system as well!
*PRODUCT LINKS*
Dell Precision 5820 Chassis: ebay.us/vd4Rze
Dell M.2 Flexbay SSD Sled: ebay.us/aK0bkJ
AMD RX580 8GB GPU: ebay.us/f64iWr
Western Digital 500GB WD Blue SN570 NVMe: amzn.to/3MvfLfE
Western Digital 4TB WD Red Plus NAS HDD: amzn.to/3OBcLB7
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*TIMESTAMPS!*
0:00 Introduction
0:45 Choosing a computer architecture for your home server
4:53 Choosing a form factor for your home server
9:33 Choosing a CPU for your home server
11:00 Finding a system that fits our needs
13:53 A word about Ebay, making offers, and favoriting sellers
14:18 Building out our new home server
15:44 Total cost breakdown for our home server
16:14 Replacing the thermal paste on our Dell Precision 5820 chassis from eBay
17:03 First boot of our freshly built home server
17:20 Final thoughts on the home server
17:46 Closing! Thank you for watching!
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**PRODUCT LINKS** Dell Precision 5820 Chassis: ebay.us/vd4Rze Dell M.2 Flexbay SSD Sled: ebay.us/aK0bkJ AMD RX580 8GB GPU: ebay.us/f64iWr Western Digital 500GB WD Blue SN570 NVMe: amzn.to/3MvfLfE Western Digital 4TB WD Red Plus NAS HDD: amzn.to/3OBcLB7
this is basically my setup except I have a 1070 and an Icy dock 2.5
I am retired and have always wanted to set up a home server. This is by far the best breakdown I have seen. Great video, keep up the great work.
Incredible job. Great overview of hardware options explained without requiring the audience to be computer scientists.
You are very good in what you do It's like listening to a Smart teacher. Thank you.
Been thinking about a home server for ESXI for a while now and this is the best breakdown on hardware I've seen recently. Thanks for the video, a like and a sub from me!
Solid video covers the basics to get people into networking! Hardware, server type, form factor, architecture, storage, fucking nailed it! Simple to follow too (Also pro tip) depending on your use case, low end gpu's or none at all isnt a bad idea. VM's generally need those graphics tho
This was very helpful! I was originally looking into a used Dell PowerEdge tower for my home server, but they cost twice the price for the older models, and I realized I didn’t need features like dual sockets or redundant power supplies. Didn’t know how cheap the Precisions were until recently, and for how new they are too, I bet you can get a lot more life out of them. Looking into the Precision 5820’s now, already got a Jetway box picked for the home networking, also gonna try to find a low powered NAS to back everything up
So glad you found it useful!
I bought my Precision T5600 back in 2018, it's been great. Paid $480 for chassis with dual Xeon 8-core 16-thread, 64GB RAM and a Quadro 600. After a couple years I did swap out the Quadro for a NVS-510 for it's quad monitor outputs. I use multiple virtual machines in my lab, and having two Windows 10 plus 4 linux machines running at the same time is no problem.
DAMN! thats a nice box sir !! Good video too !!
Nice review...but what's next? How do you set up a home server? What operating system are you running? How are you configuring the storage? Sharing to other computers? How are you load balancing?
All of those things will be addressed in future videos! Is there anything in particular you’d like to see us touch on in one of those upcoming videos?
Windows vs Linux, setup of truenas, nextcloud and the integration of same.
Thanks for the video.
im making a new homelab and will be using these tips, thank you. i plan to use a small 10" rack with multiple small 1L systems for a nas, router, and just a general server. i will also have a desktop with multiple gpu's as a multi gaming server
So glad this helped!
I’m about to build my first home server and funny enough I’ll be using a 5820 aswell. I was able to get this one for FREE. The specs are insane! I9 9980XE, P4000 GPU, 128GB ram.
awesome nice explanation
I interviewed at a place that did refurbishments like this. It was pretty interesting.
Thank you
I build a server with amd 5700G with 128G DDR4, 2TB SSD all in a modified SFF casing at about 700$. What I really like is, it came with 2.5G ethernet and bigger cache which is more suitable for server purposes
I personally love the dell workstation line. I have been using the 7600 series with 2 proc and 512gb ram with SSDS for a few years now. ran proxmox but back to esxi. I recently got a second raid card and move my Truenas Scale storage from a hp microserver to a VM. It is a super quiet wife approved system.
Love it! We ran a T7600 for quite a while as well! Fantastic platform!
I didn't think the newer version of esxi was free for us home lab users. Am i wrong?
@@harrysearia1784 yep, free just like previous versions. We made a video on installing ESXi 8, in the first part of the video we walk you through getting your own free copy: kzhead.info/sun/edCIesxwn5eppHk/bejne.html
@@2GuysTek Excellent, thank you for the quick reply.
I've been recently considering setting up a server for the fun of it and maybe some practical use. I can't see a need for a super extensive system like you showed here, I can't even think of enough services I would want it to run. I've been playing currently with an old 2009 dell desktop which is barely powerful enough to run the tasks I've asked of it, but it's seriously lacking in cpu cores and RAM. I've seen some much better spec-ed hardware listed for around $200-300 with much lower power consumption, but I hesitate to pull the trigger on that because I'm honestly not sure I have enough services that I'd /actually/ use on a regular enough basis to justify buying it, it might come in handy for certain tasks, but not much I'd need running all the time. I see all these videos talking about what the setup on their homelab servers, and mostly I see them just list OSes and VM hosts and such, and I'm like great, so you can setup a bunch of VMs/containers, what do you /actually/ have them doing that needs to run all the time and justifies the power/cost of the server?
I am using casaOS on my media server. Works like a charm and easy to maintain from a web ui
Agree! CasaOS is really a slick system! Thanks for sharing!
Barebone case with 950w psu Then add a cheaper w-2125 😅 16gb ECC 2666mhz Rx580 and got yourself a gaming PC 😅 can be used for server in the future ;)
thanks
I was given one (Dell PowerEdge R210 II) by a guy from marketplace last month (Dec 2023). Now I have two more. R620 and T410 in an 18RU Server Rack. Now I'm hooked and I'm blaming that guy 😅
realy nice option this one ,is a rig i will consider getting in few years , o a epic , my current workstation is base on 2011-3 xeon i buy in 2016 , and my server is base on 1150 i5
I went with two EPYC 3251 based servers, my power bill was already too high. A decent balance between power consumption, cost and performance at the cost of upgradability.
That’s perfect!
Link?
@@onedjscream I'm trying to post the links but the message keeps disappearing
how much wattage does it use when idle?
@@tinostarks I don't have an exact number on hand but I do know a slightly less powerful system I built with a 3201 CPU uses less than 30w at idle running pfsense.
The biggest pain is finding something affordable with ECC and has enough PCI Express that doesn't sound like a jet engine. Thanks for suggesting the Dell Precision T5820 workstation, easy way to get 128GB of ECC memory for my SQL testing.
I stated with a 12 year old Dell, but it cost me a huge amount of money to run, and was rather weak in performance. Then I found a 32 core, 68 thread AMD server that was 4 years old and cost me half the price.
I use two old computers for my home lab, it's not the most powerful computers but it's enough for my lab. TRUENAS Server : i5 4670 / 16Gb RAM / 3x 4 To RAID Z-1, it runs Jellyfin and SMB Share with S3 Backup. Proxmox server : i5 4670 / 16Gb RAM / 2 x 1 To SSD, it runs Nextcloud, Pi-Hole, NGNIX , and Home Assistant. I've bought them for cheap, and are quite efficient. Next i will bought a ZimaBoard in order to install PfSense to make a Firewall.
Awesome! There's nothing wrong with older hardware! Thank you for sharing them!
dont forget a firmware update on that - before installing any thing else :) - thanks for this info.
Great video! Got my computer ready to go but what’s next?? Unraid or Truenas or what’s the other options for small home server? What about running backs from your other machines to the new server? Windows os or Linux?
Our next video on what's next is coming very soon! Keep an eye out!
I always perform updates of BIOS and iDrac before moving forward
That's the right thing to do!
What is the best way to understand and learn about server hardware? What is compatible when building etc
For us it was to buy some and start experimenting and working with it. If your interest is in data center server hardware, then buy a used server off eBay and start playing with it. If you focus is more about the different software systems you can run on server or workstation hardware, then get a used chassis like the one we used in this video and start installing different OSes on it and playing around on it. And also (shameless plug) subscribe to our channel because we have a lot of content that focuses around server hardware! Best of luck!
Do any of the later models come with these flex bays? I'm looking for something that would take the Xeon E5 2600 v3/v4
THANK-YOU I will take your advise. I will use my spear system to convert into a server. If I may it would be great to tell you want are the components and your advice would be truly appreciated!
Consider joining our Discord! That way you can ask the community for opinions about components and get quick answer! discord.com/invite/5TcfBWBB7S
wish u included some power usage numbers, I have a T7810, dual xeon unit, but its a pig, can't use it 24/7 cause it uses too much power.
Idle numbers as-built are between 70-90W
What do you think of a dual xeon E5-2690 motherboard? For a home server or better other options?
It's an excellent platform for a homelab! Dual E5-2690s would give you 32 total threads, which is a lot of compute! On the downside, the E5-26xx CPUs are first-generation Sandy Bridge Xeons that came out in 2012, so by today's standards are getting pretty old and, because of their generation, are less energy-efficient than newer Xeon CPUs. You can check the motherboard you're planning to use and see if they support the second-generation versions of the E5-2600 series CPUs (known as the E5-2600v2) because many were compatible with those chips which would give you better efficiency and compute performance per watt! If it's all you've got, I say go for it! Get in there and start building your homelab! You can always upgrade in the future!
Wow..I got the same Dell to my home servers
It's a phenomenal piece of hardware!
I wasn't aware that you can Install a SATA HD into a SAS connector, OR is this model only use SATA connectors? My DELL 7810 only uses SATA, as It has no SAS onboard. GREAT video BTW
SAS is backwards compatible to SATA!
One quibble, WD policies on Red Disks have changed, and they are having reliability issues. I would use Seagate Iron Wolf drives.
Drive loyalty and preferences are a touchy subject for people, and I feel like brand loyalty is for suckers. We’ve had good luck with both IronWolf and Red+ drives and for us it always comes down to which disk is more affordable at the time.
I see a lot of these guys claiming you can run a home server on a Raspberry Pi, BUT I have to question the honest value in this claim, because the problems of hooking up storage devices to a Pi isn't exactly the type of computer you can actually store a number of larger files on!! And a Raspberry Pi, isn't overloaded with a large number of SATA ports so adding drives to one is nearly impossible, if you have a bunch of larger files as well!! For example my music collection alone has over 30,000 songs in it, and the hard drive I currently have my collection on, is a 3 terabyte for added capacity as I add music to it! But generally speaking the total collection in whole consumes nearly 2 terabytes by itself, and one I begin adding other files I want to share like photos, video and documents, I could easily fill a bunch of 3 or 4 terabyte drives easy enough!! AND keep in mind I am an old guy who has been working on and with computers since the 1980s, SO my collected data is pretty large by this point!! And while there are things I now long use like old software and some stored data, my collection isn't totally "sorted" either!!
Hi I wanted to know if you used this Dell with Truenas scale and if you did. Did you used GPU passthrough i purchased a Dell T7920 i can't get it to passthrough Gpu thank you for your time
I have run TrueNAS SCALE on this host, but I have not passed through a GPU to a VM or container.
My wife & I are movie freaks. On my personal PC, I have A dedicated HD for media (4TB HD) Works great for me, but not so much for my wife, I Have to often put a move to a thumb drive for her to watch on her Laptop. We defiantly need a Media server, so we can easily watch what we want without putting movies on a thumb drive.. I am very tech oriented, I build, repair & upgrade computers, Laptops & tablets pretty easily, Sad part is, I have tried building a media server, but the whole process of all the different programming for a NAS and the rest kinda overwhelmed me, I have been trying to find a simple way to build a media server for movies, TV shows & video's (Maybe pictures too) All the video's I have seen do not go into detail on step by step what to do.. I believe there would be lots of people who would benefit from a tutorial DIY Media Server Video or video series.. Loved the video and your detailed explanation on "How & Why" what you choose to use.. Sorry to babble on.. Thank you for sharing.. I also liked that you used eBay instead of Amazon.. (I am not a Amazon fan)
Awesome! So happy this helped and thank you for the home media server, start to finish! We'll add it to the list!
how can i run the server on my laptop? im new in this and i am using blender and cad programs and i have in the lap top but i dont want to lose and i need more ram with the server. :)
You can be not very accurate here. x86 Celeron based SBC can be more power efficient than Arm based. Surprise? For me too. Anyway, Arm based systems are cheaper and I selected Arm for a home server. Did you consider also Apple Arm? Mac Mini can be perfect for a home server, but it can be a bit expensive.
This was a good guide, unfortunately with a 75+w idle this would cost me $25/month to run
Did you use window server 2022 for ur OS?
I went with T5600 but could not get HDD ports to work. HDD ports 0-4 would work in bios but not in OS unless connected to Sata ports 0 or 1
What are you running on it?
Dell power edge R730 36 core 2.6ghz 256gm ram 4tb raid 5
That’s a beast of a machine!
Just bought the same exact system. I want to use it as a storage,VM and home assistant. My question do I need a powerful GPU or can I just buy a cheap one? I’m installing trueNas scale on it.
The only real consideration on the GPU would be whether you plan on doing any transcoding with it. If that’s not something you’re looking to do then a cheap GPU is fine.
Thanks
@@2GuysTekdo you have more in depth videos for a gaming server? I would love to set something like this up but videos on KZhead seem limited on tutorials on this.
@Ignotus2023 when you say gaming server, what do you mean specifically? A system to host game servers like Minecraft, or do you mean a system to run your games off of and remotely connect to play them?
HI , DELL T7910 can support ESXI 8 version as hypervisor. ?
Looks like the T7910 runs a Xeon E5-26xx v3 CPU. That generation is not supported on ESXi v8.
How loud was the server under power?/
Are you basically building a NAS?
The beauty of this 'build' is that it can be used for anything you'd want! In the first follow-on video to this one we did build a TrueNAS SCALE system out of the hardware, check it out here: kzhead.info/sun/lNGSerOQbGmgY40/bejne.html
I’m planning to buy a renewed server with this specs for VMware esxi and cybersecurity labs, what you think? Torre Dell Precision 7910 / T7910 2 Intel Xeon E5-2670 V3 de 12 núcleos de 2.3 GHz 64GB DDR4 REG Nvidia Quadro K2000 2GB 12,24 TB (SSD de 240 gb | 3 x 4 TB 12 Gb/s SAS NUEVO)
The E5-2670v3 CPU is quite old at this point. Check and see if you can upgrade the T7910 to a v4 CPU. VMware doesn’t support the v3 CPUs with v8, but do on the v4 CPUs. For most systems, the E5-26xx v4 CPUs are drop-in replacements with the v3, but check the platform (Dell’s docs) to make sure you can. Otherwise, great platform for running virtualization and running labs!
@@2GuysTek thank you for your feedback, really appreciated, my other alternative is this server Dell Precision 7820 Intel Xeon Silver 4114 10-Core 2.2GHz (3.0GHz Turbo) Memoria de 32 GB, actualizable a 512 GB SSD M.2 NVMe PCIe de 1 TB (bahías extraíbles de intercambio en caliente) Nvidia Quadro M2000 4GB - Windows 10 Professional 64 bits
@omarkobayashi this is a better option because it’s a first generation scalable Xeon CPU. You can upgrade this system easier in the future and you will get more years out of it.
Intel N100, low power, silent and powerfull
Which cpu is better for esxi virtualisation i7 9700, xeon w-2133 or xeon gen 2 E-2274G. I want to create an AD lab
Based on this: www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3335vs3084vs3584/Intel-i7-9700K-vs-Intel-Xeon-W-2133-vs-Intel-Xeon-E-2274G the i7-9700 is the clear winner.
@2GuysTek Thank you !!!
Oh hey that’s my Pc I just bought 😅🎉
You have good taste in gear!
Aren't Xeon processors power hungry? even on idle?
They can be, depending on the model of Xeon you choose. For example, the newest 4th-gen Sapphire Rapids Xeon consumes 350W TDP, which is _insane!_ I'm not recommending anyone use a chip like that in their home server. For comparison, the W-2123 Xeon in this box has a maximum TDP of 120W, and I just measured this box as-built in the video, and it hovers around 70-100W at idle.
correct. would be better to go even first gen ryzen.. up to 8 cores of good performance and at least half that power draw
I even use my xeon x3430 as my home server it has 95 watts consumption and i undervolt it to consume lesser electricity
How about viewpoint of ipmi/kvm?
My viewpoint is that I wish these workstation models had IPMI interfaces on them, and I think it's a shame they don't. Dell does have iDRAC (IPMI) interfaces on their rack-mounted workstations, but not on their desktop form factor boxes, which makes sense because typically you'd have a discrete GPU which kills the chance of KVM via IPMI.
How much power does it consume?
at idle it's around 70-90W.
Wow, that is to much for a home server build.
I hope you're not keeping those blue drives in there those Western digital blue drives are not NAS or server drives they're not meant to be on 24/7 nor do they have the reliability
We've run plenty of Blue SSDs (not HDDs) in our NASes for a long time, they have a respectable lifespan (at least 3 years typically). Now if you're talking about mechanical HDDs, I completely agree - NAS-rated drives like WD Red Pro and Seagate Ironwolf drives are a must.
When it comes to enterprise equipment, atom is NOT cheaper than x86. I'm currently looking for hardware to use as a firewall. Every single name brand firewall uses atom, and it costs 4x what i can build a Ryzen 7 system with. I understand that comparing a consumer computer with an enterprise switch is a bit unfair, because of software considerations, But honestly they are charging three thousand dollars for hardware from fifteen years ago. Any consumer grade I t x motherboard With anything more than two cores that you can buy for under two hundred dollars, can be cheaper and a faster router than any three thousand dollar enterprise router.
You're making the same mistake as several other channels here on YT by claiming that a PC of any kind can be a server. They simply are in no way, shape, manner, or form a server. These little mini PCs cannot run a NOS (Network Operating System) like Microsoft's Windows Server 2022 -- the install disk will not allow you to because they need a completely different CPU (like AMD's EPYC server CPUs or Intel's Xeon server CPUs) and different chipset. You want a "home" server? Go buy a used HP ProLiant server and start with that. Be sure to get a rack to mount it in, along with your UPS, NAS, network switch, slide-out keyboard tray, monitor shelf, and maybe a tape backup drive (or you could use a KVM switch to your desk).
sooo many scammers on ebay lots charge $1500 for shipping lol
Why are you wearing a hat inside....
Everyone's doing it, why are you wearing a hat inside?