Simplifying My Homelab atelle

Simplifying My Homelab

Over the last few years, I’ve experimented with running my homelab on different types of hardware. It’s been a journey of trial, error, noise, and heat - but also a lot of fun.

The Evolution of My Homelab

1. HP Workstation Laptop
I started out with a powerful HP workstation laptop: 64 GB RAM, dual NVMe slots, and a dedicated NVIDIA GPU. It was fast and handled everything I threw at it - but it wasn’t exactly practical long-term.

2. Synology NAS
Next, I moved everything onto my Synology NAS. Having compute and storage in one box, with 144 TB of capacity directly attached, sounded great in theory. In practice? Not so much.
All eight disks were spinning at 100% constantly, creating lots of noise and heat. Not ideal for a quiet home setup.

3. HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9
From there, I migrated to an HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9 server I salvaged from work. I upgraded it with 10 TB of SSD storage and maxed out the memory to 768 GB. It’s still running today, mainly hosting my Minecraft servers and some legacy systems I haven’t migrated yet.

4. Old Gaming Desktop
In early 2025, I repurposed my old gaming desktop. I removed the GPU, swapped the water cooling for a tower fan, and replaced all fans with Noctuas to quiet things down. With 64 GB of RAM, it was more than enough for my needs - and far less noisy than the ProLiant.

5. Raspberry Pi 5 (The Future)
Most recently, I bought a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM. This has become the heart of my homelab. It runs my websites, databases, and Dockerized services.
The only exceptions are services that require Windows or a 64-bit AMD processor, which I still run on the gaming machine.

I also keep an old Raspberry Pi 3 around for experiments. Right now, it’s powering a DIY monitoring system that uses a webcam and Python scripts for motion detection, snapshots, and live streaming via a browser.

Current Setup

HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9 → Legacy systems
Gaming Machine → Services requiring Windows or AMD64
Raspberry Pi 5 → Web server, databases, Docker services, and scripts
Raspberry Pi 3 → DYI monitoring system

The End Goal

My ultimate goal is simple: run my entire homelab on Raspberry Pi devices. They’re small, quiet, power-efficient, and - most importantly - fun to tinker with.

HomeLab Published 2025.09.13 00:11:39

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