A History of My Homelab

tehlike|2 months ago

Pretty nice.

These days data center capacity is measured with wattage. What's yours? My homelab is about 650Ws as is, and should cost around 300$/mo in electricity (california premium).

lostlogin|2 months ago

I was trying to sort a decent UPS, then got distracted by solar and bought a house battery.

Once that addition was complete I wanted to get power usage down.

macOS is a pretty terrible OS for a homelab, but the mini is amazing. It’s averaging about 5.5w and has an awful lot of power available.

UTM makes it more bearable and running services in Ubuntu works fine.

vhaudiquet|2 months ago

Fortunately, the R740 is around 230W, and the switches, routers, and everything around seems to only take 40W. Which means I'm below 300W, and I guess we have cheaper electricity in France as I don't pay as much as you (I think less than 50€/month for the homelab)

gh02t|2 months ago

I'm seeing an average cost in CA of 30c/kWhr, which should be more like $150. Is your electricity bill really running 60c per? Ouch.

elthor89|2 months ago

I really liked reading about the history of your homelab. How do you like the 3d printed rack enclosure? Is it strong enough to hold the weight and heat from the server?

vhaudiquet|2 months ago

I used PETG to print it, which should support the heat without problems. I also added two fans behind, so that the disks and enclosure stays cold. For now, I only have 4 drives in it, and it does not move at all and holds perfectly fine.

vjay15|2 months ago

Amazing, from a pi to a full blown rack, my dream homelab journey.

Also, the article about you joining canonical links to the homelab instead!

vhaudiquet|2 months ago

Thanks for noticing that! I'll try to fix right away (of course it is not happening on my local dev environment...)

gamedna|2 months ago

Can you share more details about how you connect the 3d rack enclosure to the 740?

vhaudiquet|2 months ago

Certainly! The original [link](https://makerworld.com/en/models/488435-12-trays-hdd-enclosu...) already has information. On the back I mounted SATA connectors (SATA-to-SATA, with power). I have a 1U PSU in the enclosure, which has SATA-power cables connected to the back connectors. Then, I have two SAS to 8 SATA cable that connects to the HBA card in my server on the Mini-SAS end and to the SATA connectors on the back on the enclosure. I hope that makes sense :)

zhainya|2 months ago

Great article. Really well written.

17 comments