Looking for my first Server Build

Technology Buy Curious
1

Hey,
First of… I am new here, just landed on this site randomly while searching and within 5 minutes I knew I wanted to ask my question here. The place seems awesome. :slight_smile:

Okay, so… I am intending to build my first home server. I have been experimenting with an old laptop, just to see what all is there and what all is possible with a home server, given my limited technical skills. So, before I talk about my hardware, I want to give an overview of what I intend to do with the hardware…

  1. Adgaurd / Pi-Hole
  2. Proxmox
  3. Home Assisstant OS on VM
  4. NextCloud
  5. Jellyfin (4k streaming within the house and at my sister’s place - 4 Streams in all)
  6. WordPress or something similar
  7. Hosting for the initial phase of a website, till I am certain it makes sense to pay for a cloud hosting
  8. Backups
  9. And I might discover more things

So, basically, apart from gaming I want to do as much as possible… Oh yes, I forgot…

  1. I want to explore a bit of tensor flow for my home security and try out a few similar avenues…

For this, I am planning the following build…

  1. i3-12100
  2. Asus Prime H610M-E D4 motherboard
  3. G.SKILL Ripjaws V 32GB (1 * 32GB) DDR4 3200 MHz CL16-18-18-38 1.35V (The motherboard supports 64gb on dual channel so I can add the 32gb when I need it and have budget for it)
  4. WD Blue SN570 NVMe 500GB - PCIe Gen 3 NVMe M.2 (2280)
  5. I have an old 750W 80+ power supply

The additional HDDs are well old 500GB, 1TB and 2TB ones, which is not enough for the long run, but the current budget doesn’t allow for new ones…
Yes, I could have gone for a DDR5 build, given the processor, but honestly, that was too expensive, and well DDR4 system isn’t that drastically bad.

My main consideration with the motherboard was that it should give me enough SATA Ports for my SSDs or HDDs and should have 1 M.2 slot for boot SSD. On this motherboard, I get 2 M.2 slots, so I can use one for the boot drive and one as a SATA expansion slot to get 4 more ports. And well PCI-e x16 is what I need for my (in future upgrade) 10GBps LAN port. I don’t see the need for a Graphic Card as of now because streaming shouldn’t need that much juice, right?

So my question is…

  1. Has the build got enough juice to run the things I mentioned?
  2. (obviously not while running power-hungry apps but otherwise) Is the build kind of power-efficient?
  3. Do I need a Graphic Card for any of the things I mentioned?

Thanks!

2
  1. Yes probably but consider Unraid
  2. It would be reasonably power efficient, sure
  3. You don’t need a graphics card

You are fairly slot-limited on that board. If you go beyond about 4-6 SATA drives you’ll need that full length slot to plug in an HBA to get more drives supported. That will preclude using that slot for 10 Gbit. M.2 slots CAN support SATA expansion as well, sure. Under Unraid you won’t need one of the M.2 for boot anyway.

3

Hey, thanks for the response… So, I did check out unraid after you mentioned… It seems great… but… I don’t think it’s right for me because…

  1. It’s cheapest purchase price (which is a great thing that its a ‘buy once use for life’ like any piece of hardware) is around ₹5,400… and my entire rig expense is ₹27k… so like 20% of my budget… my expense is so because I will be using old power supply and HDDs… and I guess this is also because when a product is specifically marketed to a country, it’s pricing is based on purchase power parity … rather when it’s a global price, it’s based on the regular conversion rates… so in terms of USD to INR the PPP is ~₹24 while the conversion rates are ~₹85 + international payment costs and taxes… so it’s literally ~4 times more expensive… either way the price makes proxmox (free license) a better choice for me…
    Also…
  2. The boot drive that I was talking about, I intend to run all my apps from that drive and have their data stored on the other SSDs and have my movies on the HDDs… so I will need a M.2 SSD even if I use unraid from a flash drive…

Either way… It was nice to know the options and the fact that my build is good enough in terms of power and efficiency… Also thanks for confirming that I don’t really need a GPU… :sweat_smile: