Homelab Addiction

I never actually imagined I’d get into homelabs. I always thought I’d just use rented cloud VMs from Linode/AWS/GCP or some other provider for the rest of my life. But now, post-2025 in 2026, I’m deeply focused on this new hobby of mine.

Homelabbing is addictive so far, and I’ve already bought a bunch of overpowered things that I probably do not need. At the time of writing this, RAM and storage are very expensive where I live. You can get 32 GB of DDR5 RAM for around $450 USD and 32 GB of DDR4 for about $900 USD. Storage is similar in price, with a basic 1 TB NVMe drive from Samsung or Kingston costing around $250 USD.

I have this weird OCD where I do not like used or refurbished things, but I have to work through it with myself. This is the first time I have bought something refurbished. It is just 8 TB Toshiba MG series drives that served in data centers for years. After spending some time researching, I realized these drives are built like tanks. Based on the SMART data I gathered, they went through around two years of data center usage. They were almost certainly used in Dell servers but manufactured by Toshiba. Honestly, they are far better than most newer consumer-level drives you will find on the market. These drives cost me $140 USD each.

I got four of these relatively new drives, each with around 74 to 90 TB of data written to them. I am assuming they were used as backup drives or maybe for some kind of cloud storage. Who knows, we will probably never know. In total, that gives me 4 × 8 TB = 32 TB of raw capacity. In reality, each drive is about 7.2 TB due to how drive manufacturers calculate capacity, so the usable total is closer to 28.8 TB.

After that, I picked up a random 2U case with an HP PSU inside. Not sure what it is rated for, but from what I can tell, it is likely from some OEM build. I installed all the drives and connected them with SATA cables, which I had to buy separately for $0.20 USD each. I also reused my very old computer from 2023, which has an i5-10400 and 16 GB of DDR4 RAM.

This is when I realized the motherboard I was using with the i5-10400, the same build from 2024, has a limitation. It does not allow the PCIe NVMe slot to be used if all SATA ports are populated. To work around this, I bought a PCIe-to-SATA controller and ended up purchasing two 300 GB Intel SATA SSDs for $55 USD each. These were also in great shape, with around 150 to 160 TB written on them. They were definitely used continuously for around 11 years.

There goes my NAS. It’s a simple TrueNAS Scale build with four 8 TB drives, giving around 14.4 TB of usable storage after setting up ZFS RAIDZ2. Now that’s done, we can move on to the compute side for my new Proxmox instances.

Next up is networking. I was bit dumb and picked up a Cisco SG300-52, which probably wasn’t the best choice since I could have gotten a 10G Huawei switch for just $10 more (this Cisco cost me $120). It’s small business grade, not enterprise, but for an access layer it’s more than enough. It does make a bit of fan noise and certainly draws some power.

To be continued...