Update the HomeLab Server

For the last 8 years or so, I have run my two websites on a Dell PowerEdge 1900 and it is long past time to update the HomeLab server. The old workhorse server had a dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz processer, 32 GB of Ram and a RAID controller which game me about 3 Terabytes of storage. Last year, the RAID controller failed and I was forced to migrate everything over to a small Dell PC.

For my new server, I had a few goals beyond performance:

Keep it quiet. This server is to be installed in my home office. I do not want to run a server twenty four seven in my house while generating 110 dB of sound. I have done this for a time for special projects, but for my personal server, I just do not need this background anxiety.

10 GB Network. I want to at least start to play around with 10GB network in my house. Eventually, I would like to get the entire place running at 10GB, but for now, I will be happy with the servers running at 10 GB until the cost of network switches drops to make a cost effective update reasonable.

Easy to access. Although I have a full sized server cabinet, I am not trying to maximize processing or storage density.

Speed. My old server was running relatively slow spindle drives, which caused some slower wait times for working locally.

The Plan

NZXT H9 Flow case

First an foremost, I opted to order an NZXT H9 Flow case to house the new server. This is perhaps an odd choice for a server case, but hear me out. My son build a gaming PC from the NZXT case, and I was impressed with the quality, wire management, and overall the amount of thought that went into the design. The case itself comes with a ton of fan options and will support four 2.5 inch drives and two 3.5 inch drives. The drives will not be able to be quickly replaced, but this is not very important to me for a home server.

Also, I wanted to cool the CPU with a liquid cooled CPU cooler and the NZXT H9 Flow has mounting brackets for an AIO Unit. The entire interior of the case is open to ample air flow and features a mesh screen to keep the interior dust free. A comparable unit with a rack mount case would cost three times the price. Again, for a home server, this is just not worth the extra price to me. To secure this new case in the server cabinet, I purchased a sliding shelf I found on Amazon. This will allow me to perform some simple maintenance tasks on the case without completely removing the computer from the rack.

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Motherboard, CPU and RAM

For the processing board, I those an AMD AM4 Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 which is mounted to a 3rd Gen Ryzen ATX Motherboard with 64GB of DDR4 RAM. Cooling is done with a NZXT 360mm AIO CPU Liquid Cooler. The CPU Cooler has a with Customizable LCD Display, which I am happy to leave just showing the CPU temps. From a very simplistic viewpoint, this CPU is almost 50% faster than my old server CPU with six times more processing bandwidth. The 64 GB of RAM represents eight times more ram that the old CPU.

Storage

For storage I opted to purchase Western Digital BLACK 4TB SN850X NVMe Internal Gaming SSD Solid State Drive. This drive is a dramatic update in bandwidth. I am loosing a bit of unused storage with this drive, however, the server itself still has a free NVMe socket and six unused SATA ports. If I need more onboard storage. I do however utilize a TrueNAX Server to offer NFS for backup purposes.

In Conclusion

So to date the server costs me about $1400 and represents to first home server update I have done in about eight years. Running several websites and email to server is almost completely idle. I am really looking forward to doing almost everything faster, and prehaps even reducing the number of other computers I maintain in the homelab.