Finally, I will have a real Homelab

Life after Raspberry Pi

For many years, I have been playing with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, using it for various projects such as a smart home, print server, air humidity sensors, and radio recording. However, I have always dramatically lacked power; I was unable to run multiple services simultaneously, and the 512 MB of RAM exacerbated the issues of a rather weak processor. The last straw was the continuous problems with radio recording; the new version of my script uses a simple ad-cutting mechanism—unfortunately, this led to overheating and system crashes.

So, I finally decided to overcome my hesitation and invest in something more powerful. The new computer will serve as a home NAS, a web server, and will record radio broadcasts using the Radio2Podcast script. It will also be a space for experiments for me and my friends. At the same time, my goal was to create a “homelab” on a budget.

Donor: Lenovo m710s

The foundation here is the Lenovo m710s, a small computer with a motherboard supporting LGA1151 (Intel’s 7th and 8th gen CPU supported). I managed to buy it for a ridiculous 19 € without RAM and a hard drive, equipped with a Pentium G4560. I plan to check how the processor will perform with the intended tasks—but of course, the options for upgrading the processor are vast, and the costs are limited (about 12 € for an i5-7400).

Costs

I present three cost estimates: actual, minimal, and maximum. The actual variant reflects the costs I have incurred in setting up the home server. It does not include the SSD that I already had. The minimal variant assumes equipping the server from A to Z, assuming that all components must be purchased. The maximum variant assumes the highest possible specifications that can fit in the base machine.

Power Cost

This section will be updated later.