Hardware

Storage is the part of a homelab that people tend to figure out twice. Once when they set it up, and once after something goes wrong. I’m running a Synology RS814 with 16TB attached to my Proxmox host over NFS. It works well — DSM is polished, the NFS share just appears in Proxmox’s storage pool, and the drives have been running without complaint for years. But it’s also a 2013 rackmount unit I got as part of a package deal, not something I’d necessarily recommend buying new in 2026. ...

So you want a homelab. Maybe you’ve been lurking on r/homelab for months, staring at rack builds that cost more than a used car. Maybe you’re an IT engineer at work and want a place to break things without a ticket being raised. Either way - good news: you don’t need to spend a fortune to get started. This guide is for people who want a useful homelab, not a showpiece. ...

One of the biggest surprises when I got into homelabbing was just how cheap enterprise hardware can be. Servers that cost €15,000 new, sold for €50-150 on the second-hand market a decade later. Network switches that ran the backbone of a company’s infrastructure, available for less than a pizza. 10-gigabit networking gear that was out of reach for home users a few years ago, now completely affordable second-hand. The reason is simple: businesses refresh their hardware on a predictable cycle — typically every 3-5 years. When they do, the old gear gets sold off, donated, or scrapped. Most of it still has years of useful life left. ...

One of the biggest myths about homelabs is that they’re expensive. They don’t have to be. With a bit of patience and the right approach, you can build a capable setup for a fraction of the cost of buying new. Here’s how I do it. Start with what you actually need Before you buy anything, get clear on what you want to run. This sounds obvious but it’s where most people go wrong — they buy hardware first and figure out the use case later. ...

Every homelab starts somewhere. Mine started with a conversation with a friend in bar who had a server sitting in his garage collecting dust and no interest in running it anymore. “You want it?” That’s how I ended up with an HP DL380 G6 — and honestly, it’s been both one of the best and most humbling pieces of kit I’ve ever worked with. The specs This is what’s running everything: ...