Hello everyone!

I've been running a long-term project doing endurance testing on microSD -- and today is the third anniversary of when I started this project -- so I figured it was time to give you an update on my microSD testing project.

Before I dig in, a shameless plug for my Patreon.

Next, some quick stats:

• I have a total of 351 microSD cards in my collection -- spanning 111 models across 52 different brands. Of those:
  • I've tested 177 of them to the point of failure.*
  • I have 107 of them in testing right now.
  • The remaining 67 are sitting on the shelf, waiting for one of my card readers to free up.
• These cards have endured over 133 petabytes written.
• I've completed over 4.6 million program-verify-erase cycles on these cards.
• Breakdown by brand status:
  • Name brand: 163
  • Off-brand: 91
  • Knockoffs: 30
• Breakdown by authentic flash (a.k.a. not fake flash) vs. fake flash:
  • Authentic flash: 246
  • Fake flash: 35
  • Unknown: 3
• Breakdown by size (authentic cards only):
  • 128MB: 3
  • 4GB: 6
  • 8GB: 23
  • 16GB: 15
  • 32GB: 96
  • 64GB: 68
  • 128GB: 36
  • 256GB: 4

* A card is considered "failed" when either (a) it stops working completely, (b) it makes itself read-only, or (c) at least 50% of the sectors on the card have experienced verification failures.

Ok -- so who makes the most durable cards?

Because of the variety of cards that I have, it's hard to come up with a system that produces a definite answer here. Some of how I ranked these brands is going to be based on vibes. But...to try to narrow things down, I've grouped my cards into three groups:

• Industrial-grade: Cards that are specifically labelled as "industrial" or have "industrial" in their name. These cards typically come with a datasheet that includes an endurance claim.
• High endurance: Cards that are labelled as "high endurance" (or some similar wording). Manufacturers don't always put out datasheets for these cards, but they generally still make an endurance claim on the packaging.
• Consumer-grade: Basically everything else.

Consumer-grade cards:

The average consumer-grade card has lasted about 10,000 program/verify/erase cycles (so far).

1. PNY. I have 10 of their consumer-grade cards: 3 PRO Elite Prime 64GB's, 3 Premier-X 128GB's, 3 Elite-X 64GB's, and one Elite 32GB. (I have 4 more of the Elite 32GB's that are waiting to be tested.) They've gone for an average of 643 days and 15,700 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 11.5PB to them in total. And with the exception of the one Elite 32GB -- they're all still going strong. On top of that, the PRO Elite Prime boasts some impressive performance -- every measurement I took was in the top 10% of all cards I've tested so far.
2. Kingston. I have 12 of their cards in this category -- 6 Canvas Go! Plus 64GB's (3 of the SDCG3's and 3 of the SDCG4's) and 6 Canvas Select Plus 32GB's. They've been going for an average of 694 days and about 23,500 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 11.6PB to them in total. The three Canvas Go! Plus 64GB (the SDCG3's) have all failed -- but the others are still going strong. The Canvas Select Plus's in particular have been troopers -- they're among the oldest cards in my collection, and they've been going for the better part of the last 3 years now (with no signs of letting up). Additionally, the Canvas Go! Plus 64GB's (the SDCG4's in particular) boast some impressive performance as well -- every measurement I took was in the top 7% of all cards I've tested so far.
3. Delkin Devices. I feel bad ranking Delkin so low on this list, because they've endured more data written to them per card, on average, than any other brand in my collection (in the consumer-grade category). The only reason I didn't rank them higher is because I only have one model -- the HYPERSPEED 128GB (of which I have 3). But they've done pretty well: they've lasted an average of 662 days and about 13,500 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 5.1PB to them in total. As a side note, these cards also got the highest random write speeds of any card I've tested.
4. Lexar. 3 cards dead, 5 still going. I have 3 Professional 1000x 64GB's (2 made by Micron, 1 made by Phison), 3 Blue 633x 32GB's (made by Longsys), and 2 E-Series 64GB's (with 3 more waiting to be tested). For those not in the know, the Lexar brand was sold to Longsys in 2017 -- and surprisingly, the Longsys-made cards are holding up better than the Micron-made cards. Overall, the Lexar cards have survived an average of 684 days and about 15,800 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 5.8PB to them in total.
5. Samsung. 3 cards dead, 7 still going. I have 3 EVO Plus 32GB's, 3 EVO Plus 64GB's, 3 PRO Plus 128GB's, and 1 P9 Express 256GB (with 2 more waiting to be tested). Of those, the three EVO Plus 32GB's and one of the PRO Endurance 32GB's are dead -- the rest are still going strong. Samsung's cards have lasted an average of 553 days and about 11,100 program/verify/erase cycles so far, and I've written about 7.2PB to their cards in total.

• Honorable Mention: Amazon Basics. I have four of the Amazon Basics 64GB's -- and they're all still going. They've been going for an average of 788 days and about 16,600 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 4.2PB to them in total. I honestly didn't expect Amazon Basics to be one of the top performers when I bought them...and yet, here we are.

High endurance cards:

Keep in mind, I've got less data here -- I had 237 cards that fell into the "consumer-grade" category, but only 30 that fell into the "high endurance" category. But here's the thing: they haven't really proven themselves to be significantly better for endurance than a lot of the cards I listed above -- in fact, in a lot of cases, they've been less reliable (and generally worse for performance as well). So keep that in mind as you read through the list below:

The average high-endurance card has lasted about 14,000 program/verify/erase cycles (so far).

1. TEAMGROUP. I don't feel great about putting TEAMGROUP at the top of the list for a couple of reasons. First, I only have two of them in testing at the moment -- someone sent me a 5-pack of the TEAMGROUP High Endurance 64GB's, so I have 3 more of them waiting to be tested. Second, one of them started having issues with bad sectors right out of the gate, and has continued to do so ever since. (Those bad sectors only make up less than 0.001% of the total sectors on the card right now...but I still don't like it when a card starts to have issues like that as soon as you start using it.) But the data doesn't lie -- they've survived, on average, 404 days and about 17,300 program/verify/erase cycles, and they're still chugging along. I've written about 2.2PB to these cards in total.
2. Transcend. I have 3 of the 350V 64GB's -- and they're all still going strong. They've survived an average of 760 days and about 17,000 program/verify/erase cycles so far. I've written about 3.2PB in total to them (mostly due to their mediocre write speeds).
3. SanDisk. I have my issues with SanDisk...but again, the data doesn't lie. I have 7 SanDisk cards in this category: 3 High Endurance 64GB's, and 4 MAX ENDURANCE 32GB's. As of right now, all 3 of the High Endurance 64GB's and all but one of the MAX ENDURANCE 32GB's have failed. They lasted an average of 452 days and about 16,200 program/verify/erase cycles before failing (with the MAX ENDURANCE 32GB's lasting about twice as long as the High Endurance 64GB's). I've written about 4.7PB to these cards in total.
4. Samsung. Samsung's position at the bottom of this list has less to do with how reliable their cards are and more to do with how poorly their high endurance cards perform, particularly on sequential write speeds (relatively speaking). I have 3 of the PRO Endurance 32GB's -- one has failed, the other two are still chugging along. They've lasted an average of 822 days and about 18,800 program/verify/erase cycles so far. I've written about 1.8PB of data to them in total.

Industrial-grade cards:

Keep in mind, I have even less data here. Industrial cards are expensive, so they make up a much smaller portion of the cards I've tested: just 15 in total (so far). But on the upside -- there is sufficient evidence here to say "in general, industrial-grade cards do last longer than consumer-grade cards (and, by extension, high endurance cards)".

The average industrial grade card has lasted about 122,000 program/verify/erase cycles (so far).

1. Kingston. I have 3 Kingston Industrial 8GB's; of those 3, only one is still going. But they've been troopers: they've lasted an average of 779 days and about 141,600 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 3.4PB to these cards in total. (Only one consumer-grade card has come close to this number: I have one Hiksemi NEO 8GB that has lasted for about 143,800 program/verify/erase cycles so far. No idea how.) These guys do pretty well on performance too, especially write performance: their sequential write speeds are in the top 9% of all cards I've tested.

Who makes the worst cards?

There are a bunch of no-name brands out there. They're not hard to find. I'm not going to talk about them here -- I'm going to focus on brands you're likely to have come across.

Consumer-grade cards:

1. onn. I picked up four of their 32GB cards at my local Walmart -- and they were terrible for endurance. They only lasted an average of 40 days and 1,400 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 40TBW), with the best one of the four not even making it to 1,900 cycles. On top of that, every performance measurement I took came in the bottom half of all measurements I took.
2. ADATA. I picked up 3 of the Premier 32GB's; they only lasted an average of 236 days and about 2,350 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 74TBW) before they quit working.
3. Gigastone. I have not been impressed with Gigastone. I have 11 of their cards -- 6 Full HD Video 32GB's, and 5 4K Camera Pro 32GB's. They lasted an average of just 114 days and 4,845 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 133TBW) before they quit working.
4. Micro Center. I purchased 5 of their 64GB cards; they only lasted an average of 116 days and 3,421 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 214TBW) before they stopped working.
5. Silicon Power (a.k.a. SP). I purchased 9 of their cards -- 3 Elite 32GB's, 3 Superior 128GB's, and 3 Superior Pro 128GB's. Not a one of them made it to 4,000 program/verify/erase cycles before failing -- they came in at an average of 159 days and about 2,350 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 252TBW) before failing.

• (Dis)honorable mention: SanDisk. SanDisk represents the single biggest brand in my collection: I have 28 of their cards in this category (with 4 more on the shelf waiting to be tested). It's telling that of those 28, only 5 are still going (and one of them is in its death throes) -- especially when cards from so many other brands have far outlasted them. Many of them have died under circumstances any other card would have handled just fine -- a problem I've written about on my blog before. They've lasted an average of 384 days and 9,404 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 566TBW) so far.

High endurance cards:

1. Integral. I bought 3 of the Security 32GB's; the only managed to last an average of 100 days and about 5,600 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 173TBW) before failing. To be fair to them, the package did make an endurance claim that works out to about 2,850 program/verify/erase cycles -- and they did manage to almost double that. However, they didn't hold a candle to many of the other high endurance cards that I tested.
2. Kingston. This one was truly a surprise -- I bought 3 of the High Endurance 32GB's, and they only lasted an average of 143 days and about 8,300 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 258TBW) before failing. The product packaging didn't make an endurance claim; I had to hunt around on Kingston's website to find it. Their claim works out to about 5,100 program/verify/erase cycles, which they did manage to beat. But again, so many other cards managed to last so much longer -- hell, so many other Kingston cards managed to do so much better -- that I was surprised and disappointed when these failed so early.

Industrial-grade cards:

1. SanDisk. I bought 3 of the Industrial 8GB's. They only lasted an average of 234 days and about 20,000 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 160TBW) before failing -- and the only reason they lasted that long was because I let my program trudge through an nearly-unending string of I/O errors for months on end -- before they finally just gave up the ghost.

So yeah...that's all I have for now. Feel free to ask questions (although I'm at work at the time I'm posting this, so I may not have time to respond)! Otherwise...look for another update from me next year!

Pictures attached:

1. Part of my setup: a Beelink Mini-S and five TRIGKEY Green G4 mini PC's. The Beelink has an Intel N95 with 8GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD, while the TRIGKEY's all have Intel N100's with 16GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD. There's also (in the lower-right corner, behind the monitor) an MSI GE62VR-7RF (with an Intel i7-7700HQ, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD), a Lenovo IdeaPad Y580 (with an Intel i7-3630QM, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD), and an ASUS Strix GL504GM (with an Intel i7-8750H, 32GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD)
2. Another part of my setup: a TRIGKEY K-N100 and an AOOSTAR N1 PRO. The TRIGKEY has an Intel N100 with 16GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD. The AOOSTAR has an Intel N150 with 12GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD.
3. Dog tax.

I got super lucky on this deal. I've seen this listing available for about 2 months now in my area, and once he lowered the price I hit him with the $30 offer. Surprisingly got a yes, $30 for 12 blade server shells (listed as motherboards and PSUs only) is a killer deal.

Got them all home, opened some up, and MANY units had CPUs and ram still in them!! The guy thought he took them all out to sell on eBay himself. Total ram is 184gb DDR3, 160gb DDR4. This is insane to me and I had to share.

I'm breaking everything down into 4 systems, and giving away locally the other 8 chassis.

One 2RU dell with 16gb DDR3 is going to my workplace for us technicians to do system testing with. One 2RU IBM a co-worker is taking home to teach his kids about servers and non-home hardware. One 2RU 160g DDR4 server is going to my homelab, and one 2RU 152gb DDR3 server is going to a friend's homelab.

What would YOU do with 160gb DDR4? Big local LLM context? Game servers? Ramdisk?

edit: spacing

edit2: if anyone is in California and wants to pickup the spare chassis, you can have them. If nobody picks them up, then the Mobos, PSUs, and backplanes are going on eBay.

I work at a MSP as a Sr. Infrastructure Engineer. I’m 34, and I hoard enterprise equipment. Oh, first time poster too!

The first picture is the datacenter. In the basement. Stays about 68-70F year-round. Pulls about 800-1,000 watts continuously.

The smaller rack, that’s the production/core gear. Critical for connectivity in the house.

Fortigate 100E
(2) Dell N3048P Stacked
Buffalo NAS - Backups
Seagate External to backup Buffalo NAS - Backup of backups
Carrier Modem
(2) Western Digital NAS, Media storage, they replicate together
(2) HP DL360p, Server 2022, Hyper-V, VM replication, I manually load-balance and fail-over.
APC Battery Backup

Next, the larger rack is my sandbox. Currently it hosts POTS and Dial-up connectivity. I’m swapping out my Courier V.Everything modems for a pair of Paradynes. I’ll only list the active gear in this one.

Avocent 4-port console server
Cisco 1861 for analog/POTS
Cisco 2811 for PPP Dial-up
(2) Paradyne Modems for Bulletin Board System access (not shown… yet)
Falcon pure-sine UPS - this was retired from a home elevator system. It’s rated for 120V/25A.

Then finally…. My stack of old HP Elitedesks. I got bored one day, and with my team of developers (ChatGPT) I built a custom HPC cluster. It’s not a true HPC Cluster per se, but it’s pretty cool imo.

It’s got an Ubuntu head-end PXE server that also hosts the cluster controller. The (8) HP Nodes are diskless, hence the PXE boot.

I’ll make a more in-depth post about that particular homelab project, but essentially I have it doing PDF OCR, Magnetic disk Flux decoding, media file verification. Anything that would be faster with parallel processing I’ll add to the workload capability.

Hey all, I wanted to share my lab setup. I had built it originally about 6 or 7 years ago, but never followed through. Ended up moving and that put the nail in the coffin on that project, at least until recently. A lot of the tech in my setup has been collected over the years, and I finally got around to cramming it all together. Now it's way beyond what I was building back then.

Hardware is as follows

Baremetal K8s:

- 3 x Lenovo Thinkcenter m720q upgraded to 64gb ddr4

- 3 x Lenovo Thinkcenter m93p upgraded to 32gb ddr3

- MSI ws65 Workstation Intel i7 Nvidia Quadro 5000, 16gb VRAM 32gb ddr4

Storage/Persistent Volumes:

- UGREEN dxp4800 GT NAS

Network

- TP-Link TL-SG3428X 24x1gbs 4x10gbs SFP+ (2x LACP LAGs to firewalla and NAS

- Firewalla Gold Plus (LACP to modem, switch)

- Firewalla AP7

- Netgear Nighthawk CM1200

Kiosk

- Beetronics 22 inch touchscreen

- Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 on a WaveShare CM5-POE-BOX-A board and enclosure

LoRa (Meshcore/Meshtastic/MQTT pipeline)

- 2 x Lilygo T-Beam Supreme

- 1 x Seed SenseCAP Solar Node

- A shit ton of other esp32s that aren't integrated all the time

Daily driver/Home media center

- AMD Ryzen 9 7900X

- 64gb DDR5

- Nvidia RTX 4800

- Fedora 44

Let me know what you all think, I may do a follow-up post on the K8s side of things since I didn't want to write out a whole essay in this one.

My son is working for the summer at our local equivalent of a Goodwill. He texted me a few days ago to say that someone had just donated some equipment that was claimed to be a 20TB NAS. I thought that sounded like a fun project to tinker with, and $20 was hard to argue with.

It turned out to be a NetApp DS14 MK2 with 14 300GB Seagate Cheetah 10K drives, (so not 20TB, but that's OK).

After digging up a console cable and doing some troubleshooting with Gemini I was able to get connected to it and find that the NVRAM battery was too low for it to boot. Left it overnight to charge and I was able to get it booted up and reset the password.

Now for the part that leads to the warning... Nothing had been reset or wiped before this was donated, so all the files were intact. Pretty much the only thing on it was around a dozen virtual machines. The more concerning part was that I was able to trace the unit down to a local company that provides enterprise cloud security services to a bunch of large national organizations.

So, here's the warning... Please, please, please, before you throw out any kind of server, workstation, or other personal digital device, factory reset it, or wipe it before it gets sent to e-waste, or gets donated anywhere else.

I've reached out to the company who used to own this NAS to inform them, and give them a say in my next steps with their old NAS. I'll either return it to them, or sanitize the device before I retire it completely.

I'm not going to keep it running, more than likely, mostly because it's pretty power hungry for only a few TB, and it only supports SMB 1.0/CIFS, but I thought you'd all like to hear the story.

Im sorry for that
for the hardware (i haven’t finis to install all)

- 9x 4090 48gb
- 2 rtx 6000 max-q 96gb (8 are coming soon)
- 6x 7900xtx
- 2x 3090
- and a bunch of amd (not really valuable, it’s a bunch 9060-9070XT and 6700xtx)
- total of 512+ gb of dddr5 + the same in ddr4
- 2x threadripper pro 9965WX (they’re coming as well, tomorrow)
- 1x threadripper pro 3xxx (forgot)
and that’s, for now, all 🙏🏽

It’s still a small HomeLab with only two mini PCs and a TP-Link switch.
The Dell is equipped with an i3-6100T and 10GB of DDR3, and it’s currently my main DevOps machine for learning and experimenting with Docker and other stuff.
The Lenovo is still new to my lab. It’s rocking an i5-6500T and 8GB of DDR4 right now. This will become my main mini PC once my new RAM sticks arrive.
As for the LEGO rack — for now, it’ll serve us for as long as possible. 😄 We had a ton of fun building it together, and honestly, that’s probably the best part of this little HomeLab project. ❤️

Im 14 and somehow managed to get a 47U Rittal rack for free.

I've been interested in networking, servers and homelabbing for a while now and have been slowly putting together a home lab with whatever equipment I can get. I recently got in contact with Rittal, and they offered me a 47U rack for free. I wasn't expecting to get something this big, but obviously I wasn't going to turn it down.

It's a Rittal 47U rack, so there is a ridiculous amount of space compared to what I actually have to put in it at the moment.

My current equipment isn't anything too crazy. I've got a NETGEAR ProSAFE switch and two Juniper EX3200 PoE 48-port switches. The Junipers are probably going to be some of the first things going into the rack properly once I get everything sorted.

I'm also receiving an Arista DCS-7050TX-72Q-R 10Gb switch for free, which I'm pretty excited about. On top of that, I've got a random rack server coming for free as well. I don't know exactly what I'll end up using the server for yet, but I'm sure I'll find something to do with it. I also have an old IBM server with 40GB ram running Proxmox.

The funny part is that I now have a 47U rack but nowhere near enough equipment to fill it. I'm going to have a lot of empty rack space for quite a while.

My plan is to gradually build the lab up over time rather than trying to fill the rack all at once. I'd like to add more servers, networking equipment, storage and other things that I can find or get for the lab. I'm also interested in learning more about things like virtualisation, routing, switching, networking and running different services at home.

I'm still pretty surprised that I managed to get a rack this size for free, especially at 14. It definitely gives me a lot more room to expand the lab in the future.

For anyone who has a larger rack in their homelab, what kind of equipment would you recommend adding to a 47U rack if you were starting from basically nothing? .

Everything was bought used except the SSDs.

Total compute power:

4x Xeon Gold 6140 (56 cores / 112 Threads @ 3.7Ghz)

2TB DDR4 3200Mhz ECC

128TB (16x 8TB Samsung 9100 Pro)

100GBe Network

Currently running FREEBSD 15.1 and Llama.cpp for testing. I will likely implement Proxmox as a hypervisor in the near future.

Recently, I found two old Pixel 3a devices in a drawer and wondered what I could do with them. I didn't want to throw them away, and given current RAM prices, I figured it might be worth repurposing them as a homelab.

Everything relies on one amazing project: PostmarketOS (huge thanks to the community, and a quick shoutout to r/pmos ). I started by flashing both Pixel 3a devices with pmOS, installed K3s, and that was it! (Well, it required a bit of network tweaking because the phones couldn't access the internet at first).

I then scoured classified ads and snagged a OnePlus 6T for €50, which I added as a worker node to the cluster.

Today, the cluster consists of 3 nodes (including one control plane). The performance is obviously lower than a mini-PC or a proper server, but it's more than enough to run 3 Hermes agents and a full Grafana stack. They are all connected via Wi-Fi to my network.

I still have two more phones to provision: a Poco X3 Pro and a Pixel 6a (which I also got for €50 each). The Poco X3 Pro should join the cluster soon. However, I bought the Pixel 6a a bit too hastily: the Wi-Fi chipset isn't recognized on PostmarketOS yet. I'm holding onto it until I find a solution, but it looks like it'll be trickier than the others.

For anyone interested in trying this out, here are a few tips:

• Unlocked bootloader: Make sure your phones are carrier-unlocked and have an unlocked bootloader, otherwise you won't be able to flash anything.
• Hardware compatibility: Always check the list of supported devices on the PostmarketOS Wiki. Make sure Wi-Fi, internal storage, and the screen are working; everything else is optional.
• Batteries: Currently, the phones still have their batteries, but they will be removed for obvious safety reasons.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts, or if anyone else has already done something like this, feel free to chime in! :)

I’ve been working on getting my certs in place for a possible career change in the future. Through studying and out of curiosity I’ve decided to build a homelab! I’m running a few VM’s for home networking, gaming servers, and most importantly labs for my studies. It is almost complete with only a few things missing. I’ve been blessed with already having a printer allowing me to print every bracket I need. 90% of my hardware was acquired second hand on eBay or Facebook with all of them being crazy lowballs so this has been very affordable so far! Brand new to the field so apologies if I use the wrong terminology, my only experience before this is just building personal gaming pc’s. All feedback positive or negative is welcomed!

What I currently have:
2 node Dell 3050’s running proxmox
5 2tb 3.5 7200 HDD’s in RAIDz1 on truenas
Netgear GS108E switch
UPS with automation for server shutdown

What I’m currently working on:
I am migrating my nas hardware to an mitx settup (bottom of rack)
Rocking a Supermicro X11SSV-Q, i5 6500, 32gb ram, HBA card, and an FSP SparklePower Flex ATX PSU 450w
Adding fans to the back of HDD cage for cooling. Adding fan to HBA card
Starting to organize and cable manage the back

What I plan on adding:
I plan on having a 3rd Dell 3050 node to run a true proxmox cluster (middle empty rack)
I have a M720q on order to make an opnsense router (top empty rack)
Second POE switch to go behind the rack for additional hookups and future access point mounting in middle of house.

I've always believed good design isn't just about looking pretty. It's about how something makes you feel every single day. Apple figured this out decades ago: when the thing on your desk is beautiful and considered, you enjoy using it more.

So when I built my home NAS, I refused to let it be an ugly box of wires shoved in a corner. It's a Dell OptiPlex Micro paired with a custom 6-bay 2.5" drive cage. Inside the mini PC there's an M.2 to 6-port SATA adapter, and the cage has two SATA backplane boards (3 bays each), dual cooling fans, and genuine Dell 12th/13th-gen server caddies with LED activity lights that glow just right.

I rack-mounted it with a patch panel and switch above, yellow patch cables all lined up. It's tiny, quiet, sips power. And honestly, walking past it every day and seeing everything neat and intentional gives me a little hit of satisfaction.

Anyone else here design their lab around how it looks and feels, not just specs? Would love to see your setups. Show me the labs you're proud of.

As the title states, I’m a first time NAS user taking the plunge. Great timing by me to get into this when prices are so affordable!

Hardware:
DXP4800 pro
Two 12tb seagate iron wolf HDDs (RAID 1)
Two 1tb Samsung 990 pro M.2 SSDs for cache
Two 16gb Crucial DDR5 RAM, enough to cover what I’m doing and leave a good amount of headroom to explore.

Uses:
Jellyfin server for my family and friends, and full… um… stack that I don’t think I’m supposed to mention
Immich server to get off iCloud
Paperless-ngx / mealie / caddy / tailscale / uptime kuma / watchtower / home page

Expanding to:
Home assistant (already have hue lights / nest thermostat)
Will be adding new Mac mini m5 pro 64gb when it arrives for local llm / open web ui
Will be building a chess coach app that pulls my games from chess.com and creates puzzles based on positions from my games, etc

Would love any advice that you may have for a first timer, or any details on the coolest thing you’re using your homelab for. I plan to get creative and try to come up with as much as I can with this.

Thank you for being a great community, I’ve learned a lot just reading the past couple months!

I am a 37 year old cyber security student and I am working on building a homelab to practice my networking and documentation skills. Here’s what I came up this past year.

Most everything is stuff we had and I just started connecting it. The only difference was my husband had an old hp laptop with a corrupted start up that I wiped and put mint Linux and Casa Os. It’s 10 years old, but she’s chugging along.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome. I am hoping to continue to build onto it. Especially any info on building a music library and sharing it with both Macs and Androids.

My spending on this project so far has been:
Raspberry Pi 6 (180$) - I got a fun chassis when I initially built it for a school project
Ethernet switch - it was about (40$)- my in-laws gave it to me for my birthday
Shelving unit-(35$)on Amazon

~~~~post update~~~~~

I am so thankful for all the feedback and suggestions!!! So I have had a ton of questions asking if I had a software that I am using for the map... no, it's AI generated and it is incorrect. I updated it, and at the suggestion of others I am going to start learning Drawio. I am putting the updated map here for the meantime.

I was rooting around a file crate and found this image of My Home Lab in 1999. Both rack mount servers had SBC back plane motherboards with Dual Pentium Pro 200 MHz processors and 128 MB of ram in each. One was Running Netware 4.11 and the other had Windows 2000 Server installed. The workstation was running Windows 98 IIRC. Good Times.

Took me 10 years to piece together this whole mess, started with a Raspberry Pi 4 rubber banded to a 4TB USB HDD sitting on top of the router. Still long ways to go, but feeling good about where I'm right now.

Edit: Raspberry Pi 3B, which died and upgraded to a Pi 4. Added another 5TB drive to the mix as well at that point.

I know they are old and basically useless but I want to use these as a test bed for learning how to configure clusters.

Three OptiPlex 3050 6th Gen i3 systems.

Any tips?

I look forward to meeting you all! PS. this thing is so heavy its destroying the wheels that I put on it. I have no idea how i would go about changing them now!!! LOL

I have a very elaborate home sound system. When you press this button, all other audio is temporary muted and a very loud thunder clap blasts out of all speakers.

Super dumb, but a lot of fun at parties especially around Halloween and the like.

Playback has changed over the years. Right now it's a small SD card file player. It's been raspberry pi's, dedicated broadcast hardware, sometimes an RS232 interface running to a rack computer, winamp's com control plugin, etc. always fun to tinker with.

First time using a copper sfp and knew they got hot but they get crazy hot!

Small heat sink so I thought why not and it does work :)

I'm finally free from the Intel/AMD world and running completely arm64 on Ampere CPUs

I picked up three of these 2 node engineering samples Mt. Bonnells from Ebay, they're single socket Ampere, 3 M.2 on the montherboard, OCP 3.0 and a single PCIe slot and connected to 6 U.2 NVME upfront.

Each node has a Q80-30, 80 core Ampere at 3Ghz, and 64-128GB RAM each, 500-1.5 TB NVME

The Mt. Collins below started it all and each has a 3090, Dual Q80-30 and 128GB RAM and 2TBs of NVME between the front and M.2

Most of the nodes have single 40GB port to my Arista's but im converting them to 4x25Gb (100GB is in my future with NVMEof from my NAS)okay

It's all a baremetal K8s cluster running on Talos with Omni (also running on arm64 OrangePi)

Since I think hardware is only the half of what r/homelab, what I'm running in the cluster:

• Flux via Flux Operator
• CNI / kube-proxy replacement / BGP: Cilium + Hubble
• Ingress: Gateway API Cillium integration but also Envoy Gateway
• Kyverno, Descheduler
• KEDA for autoscaling
• cert-manager (Cloudflare DNS-01)
• cloudflared for remote access to Woodpecker webhooks
• Node Feature Discovery, metrics-server, kube-state-metrics

Storage / Data

• Longhorn
• S3: SeaweedFS (+ Iceberg REST catalog) on NAS iSCSI LUNs
• Postgres: CloudNativePG + Barman Cloud plugin
• ClickHouse via the ClickHouse Operator
• Trino (KEDA-autoscaled workers)
• Dragonfly for Redis replacement/caching
• NATS + JetStream (NACK) for pipelines and automations
• zot switched from Harbor since they didn't have Arm builds
• Gitea

Misc Workflows/ML/AI Stuff

• Temporal
• Ray via KubeRay
• MLflow
• BuildKit arm64 builders (buildx kube driver)
• agent-sandbox controller

Observability

• OpenTelemetry Operator + collector/target allocator
• VictoriaMetrics (vminsert/vmselect) + VictoriaTraces
• Dual write to ClickHouse for traces/metrics (ClickStack schema) which will replace VM

AI / ML (on 2x RTX 3090, ARM64)

• [JupyterHub] (https://jupyter.org/)
• Envoy AI Gateway → Anthropic / OpenAI / OpenRouter / local models
• Open WebUI
• Gateway API Inference Extension EPP (had to build this in ARM)
• ASR: whisper.cpp with whisper-large-v3, NVIDIA Nemotron streaming ASR (NeMo)
• Diarization: NVIDIA Sortformer (NeMo)

• audio-transcriber / audio-diarizer / audio-fusion — AES67 (Dante) DRA I (Claude) wrote to move this from my speaker setup into my cluster

• AI-text detection stack: adaptive-classifier/ai-detector, ModernBERT-based detectors, authormist-originality, tmr-ai-text-detector

• Nemotron Content Safety

DNS

• blocky (Dragonfly-backed cache) + blocky-sync, a controller I (Claude) wrote to reconcile blocky config from CRDs

Media

• Jellyfin, Sonarr, Radarr, Bazarr, Prowlarr, SABnzbd
• All using CNPG Postgress Clusters for the ones that support them

I’m a bit proud of how this turned out so I wanted to share it.

Few weeks ago I posted this. In the end, I didn’t go with any of the cases I already had (gave one away to the nephew, one was already in use and the last one felt a bit too old/scratched). I also admit I sometimes cannot resist shiny new stuff.

Coming from a Supermicro SC826 with 11 HDDs, I needed those in my new relatively compact tower (Fractal Design Epoch).

I dropped two 2TB drives, and now the system runs 9 HDDs with one slot left for future expansion once the price goes down (yeah, it is probably not happening anytime soon).

So, after way too many hours working on this, I’m very happy with the result. Temperatures are actually better than expected, even better than what I had in the rack. It does not exceed 30°C during a parity check with 3x120 mm fans at 50% RPM, so I will probably reduce the speed a bit more.

Specs, if anyone’s curious:

• Unraid
• i5 12600
• 32GB RAM
• 2x 500GB NVMe (appdata)
• 1x 2TB NVMe (cache)
• ~68TB usable storage

Edit : The print files link (everything is free to download/use/remix)

Been messing around with a slightly weird portable setup lately.

I’m beta testing the PixelMob Pro. It’s built primarily as portable storage and a camera companion for photography, but naturally, I had to see what else it can run. Tiny portable homelab territory.

It supports 3x M.2 NVMe drives, which makes it pretty interesting for this kind of use.

At home I already have a proper home server, and with my old UnifyDrive UT2 I used to dump the day’s photos at the hotel, connect to Wi-Fi, and let Syncthing push everything straight back home.

It worked great, so I’m pushing the PixelMob down the same rabbit hole: local storage, Syncthing, remote sync, networking and AP configs.

Still figuring out the final stack, but apparently my homelab is starting to fit in my bag now. 😅

Anyone else running a mini server setup while travelling?

I would like to introduce my tiny production homelab.

From bottom to top:

UPS Cyberpower CP1500EPFCLCD
A Raspberry PI Zero 2W connected to it and running NUT. The mini PCs are monitoring the UPS via it

BLUETTI Elite 30 V2 Portable Power Station
Main power is going to it then to the UPS.

UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Plus
4x8TB, 32 GB RAM, running TrueNAS 25.10.5.

Noctua NF-A20 PWM with a fan controller

Power strips

PSUs and Xiaomi Redmi 5C
The Xiaomi is displaying a Home Assistant dashboard showing current battery and power consumption of the UPS and the power station

3X HP Elitedesk 800 mini G6
Each one with Intel Core i5 10500, 32 GB RAM and 3x NVMEs. Two of them are in a Proxmox cluster, the third one is a Proxmox Backups Server.

1x HP Elitedesk 800 G4
Intel i5 6500, 16 GB RAM, 2 NVMEs. Running Frigate.

Xiaomi Redmi 12
Displaying a Beszel dashboard with the hosts' information.

TP-Link TL-SG108PE
For connection between the rack hosts and the main network.

A 4 ports 2.5 GbE switch
For connection between the Proxmox instances and the PBS (daily backups are running through it)

ZigStar UZG 01
Zigbee2MQTT Coordinator - powered via POE and accessed via LAN

Monitoring consists of Beszel, Uptimekuma and Pulse running on another Xiaomi Redmi 5C (located out of the rack).

Cheers!