I was sorting some pictures recently and realized how often I’ve changed our home server. Early on we just needed a file server, but now we have DVR and media server duties, security cameras, and a number of self-hosted and on-premises services that require much more. I could probably talk about each of these at length, but I’ll try to keep it short.
VIA M’SERV S2100 (2013ish)
Released in 2012, these cute little machines are just big enough for 2 hard drives. Great for file serving duties and quiet. I had three of them deployed amongst family members houses at one time and they lasted a long time.
Specs: single core 1.6 GHz VIA Nano CPU (8W), 4GB memory, 2x 1TB HDDs, dual gigabit networking.
Pros: Small, quiet, power efficient.
Cons: Little CPU power, couldn’t get memory over 4GB despite 64bit, max 2x 3.5″ drives.
Supermicro Short Depth 1U (2017)
This was the start of the “rackmount stuff would be cool!” phase. Our house is on a raised foundation, and running network cables everywhere is relatively easy. I put in a makeshift 19″ rack under the printer shelf for the network gear, and that worked out well. It could be more messy…
For some reason I thought a short depth (14″) 1U server would fit in there (the picture above is recent, it technically had a free spot back in the day), but it just wasn’t to be. Mounted it vertical on the wall and it did its job happily for several years. Mostly the same file server duties, but now starting to experiment more with Plex and over-the-air antenna DVR’ing.
Specs: 4 core 8 thread Intel Xeon X3480 processor (95W), 16GB memory, 2x 8TB hard drives, SSD boot drive, dual gigabit network, and a Hauppauge WinTV-quadHD PCIe card.
Pros: More CPU, more memory, a PCIe slot.
Cons: Loud (1Us aren’t known for being quiet! 🤣), higher power draw, max 2x 3.5″ drives.
Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 (2020)
I won this in a work hardware raffle and it came with all the accessories for mounting 4x 3.5″ drives. The two drives became four, and over-the-air antenna duties went from the unreliable (because of kernel drivers) PCIe card to a network appliance (SiliconDust HDHomeRun HDHR5-4K). Proxmox and virtualization was now in use, becoming more of a homelab setup.
Specs: 4 core 8 thread Intel i7-4770 (84W), 32GB memory, 4x 8TB hard drives, SSD boot drive, single gigabit network.
Pros: 4x 3.5″ drives, quieter.
Cons: Not a big upgrade in CPU, looks silly laying on its side.
Supermicro Mini-ITX Mini Tower (2022)
This neat mini-itx case from Supermicro (SuperChassis CSE-721TQ-350B2) holds 4x 3.5″ drives, a low profile PCIe card, and not a lot else. The motherboard (X10SDV-4C-TLN2F) packs a lot for the small space, being the first of my servers with an nvme SSD and BMC (baseboard management controller) so everything from bios, rebooting, powercycling and such can be done remotely over the network. Efficiency increased but raw processing power decreased.
Specs: 4 core 8 thread Intel Xeon D-1521 (45W), 64GB memory, dual 10gigabit network, BMC
Pros: BMC, efficient, can handle more memory, well built case, blinkenlights for each disk!
Cons: Noisy CPU fan, slower CPU clock speeds
Node 304 Mini Cube (2023)
I didn’t have a picture of the front, so enjoy this boring product image. Another mini-itx case (Fractal Design Node 304), but now with two more 8TB drives joining the pool it can hold all 6! A faster processor (integrated on a SuperMicro M11SDV-8C+-LN4F), more memory and a SAS host adapter expand the server options. The system is still pretty efficient and compact. Maybe one day I’ll get out the power tools to install the custom 3D printed front with a 200mm fan, but the surgery is pretty intensive so not jumping on that quite yet.
Using Proxmox for management, this machine handles: security cameras with AI detection (Windows 11 + BlueIris + DeepStack), Media + DVR (Plex), Home Automation (Home Assistant), network stuff (vpn, dns, unifi), file serving (samba) and is a playground for homelab type stuff.
Specs: 8 core 16 thread AMD EPYC 3251 (55W), 128GB memory, quad gigabit network, BMC
Pros: About twice as powerful as the i7-4770, and 2.5 that of the Xeon D, more memory, more drives, still efficient and relatively quiet.
Cons: Clock speeds better (2.5 boost to 3.1) compared to Xeon D (2.4 boosts 1 core to 2.7) but still a bit low, memory clock drops when using 4 sticks of memory reducing performance so using 2 more expensive higher capacity sticks, no disk blinkenlights.
Future
No plans to upgrade this system at this time, and it handles all of the tasks very well. It can get overwhelmed at times when the security cameras have lots of motion from wind and the AI is trying to detect things, however upgrading a whole working system for that is overkill.
Hope you learned from some of my mistakes and see what kind of options are out there for home servers!