This TINY Server Can Run An Entire HomeLab (almost) 

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year everyone 🌲☃️🎁

For your 6th pillar (NAS), you could use an external 4 bay HDD enclosure (like an ICY BOX IB-3740-C31) It support 10Gbps USB-C and you get realworld transfer speeds in excess of 800MBps. That's what I use for a very low power NAS/Home server setup

If you want to be even more efficient with your firewall in this set up: OpenWRT as LXC container uses a LOT less memory. You could probably put home assistant in a container as well. You also don't need a VM for Docker, you can do: Docker nested containers in LXC as well. So all in all, if you wanted, you can do without VMs entirely.

Gotta love Quicksync transcoding! Awesome little product and Merry Christmas!

Thanks for the content, very informative as always. I would very much love an in depth video on you firewall setup❤

Thanks for this review! Really usefull. I always love your content and recommend your channel to my colleagues also running HomeAssistant.

I bought the R1 a few months back after seeing your previous video. I'm very impressed with the R1 as it has pfsense running as my firewall, OpenMediaVault connected to an 8TB usb drive as my NAS, Home Assistant is also running with 3 x cameras on frigate and I also have Plex running for my media. So far it's done me proud, I'm currently pondering whether to pass the GPU to HA to help the IP cameras and even maybe remove my Plex Ubuntu server and run Plex as the HA add-on.. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not . I also run my pfsense using 2 x NICs as vmxnet3 cards but after seeing this video.. I'm wondering if I should pass 2 NICs through to pfsense instead? Thank you for another great video and here's wishing you and everyone else a very happy Christmas.

I believe that there is nothing more powerful and cheaper (for today) than Lenovo M720q + 2 TB NVMe + 64GB RAM + CPU i7 9700T I have built that for 400$ and it's working on 65W power supply

I’d like to ask for a deepdive onto Jellyfin transcoding config, I’m having some trouble on myinstance with resource consumption with random spikes at 100% load for apparently no reason.

Happy Holidays Lewis...Merry Christmas... and thank you for all your videos, it helps me alot...I picked up up 2 Beelink SER5 Mini PC, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H(up to 4.4GHz) 8C/16T, Mini Computer 16GB DDR4 RAM 500GB NVME SSD at the being of this year for $400 Cdn...I use Proxmox on both, with HA vm, and other vm's...This is so much cheaper to run than my old IBM X3500 and Dell T310 server...I still use the Unified firewall and a QNAP NAS...I currently backup my current HA vm to another Proxmox machine, and switching from one HA to another is "seemless", even with MQTT broker add-on...I will look at this machine because of all the different NIC's but...I currently use my managed Unified switch for that...have a Great Holiday...🙃

I dont need this, but I NEED this.

Any chance you came across a tutorial on how to get the igpu passthrough to a vm to work?

Loving the videos, small production tip would be to look into adding a hair light to your main "talking head" shot, would give slightly better sepperation between you and your desk. Either way love the video and looks like a great product

I really cannot wait for plug-n-play over the air TV guide and recording for Jellyfin, i'd drop plex tomorrow just because of how unstable plex has been, on windows, linux, and TrueNAS.

Merry Christmas Lewis and family 🎄

You're great at server related content. Although there are plenty of other content creators out there doing the same thing, I think you could find some great success if you wanted to do more!

Brother, if this vid was monetized you would absolutely get my $2. Excellent review!

Thank you, this is exactly the setup i wanted to know, and if it would perform!

Thank you and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you an yours. 👍🏻🎄🎅🏻❄

Pretty nice device. Not sure if inside the price range I can afford right now. But I wanted to write mostly because you nextcloud tip is exactly what I needed right now!

Thanks for the video! Very interesting little piece of hardware. Would be nice to see like a comparison video of some of the different ones you have or something similar. 😊 Hope you had a Merry Christmas! 🎄

Wolfgang's channel has a video on how to build a low-power home lab, much more involved but a build that can be maintained and upgraded. And it probably would end up much cheaper.

I currently run home assistant in a docker container, would be good to see a video with the benefits of running in a VM and other install methods.

Love your videos, and this one is no exception at all. Of course there are other hardwares that cna be reviewed or used to run a home lab, but this one's very focused on a hone need, considering power consumption. Would love to have one of these, but Brazilian government taxes it in 60%, so it's going to be more expensive than using a full pc, despite the power usage. I have a hone automation server, usong home assistant with more than 100 devices, and also building a storage server to replace google drive. I'm planning on using two pcs, on different sites, with internal disk redundancy and also over network. A product like this would certainly be my first chiice if it wasn't for the price. Excellent video!! Merry Christmas!

Great video, as always, but I'll stick to old laptops for my stuff. I just can't justify the amount of dosh needed for this one. As for the power consumption, I will rely on my solar panels (and future batteries), low cost heating, etc to give me reasonably price efficient power for my older power munching computers. Merry Christmas t'ya'all

Would love to see some kind of "why you might want to build a homelab" type video

I want to get one soon, then run Opnsense alone on one ! Good video sir !

who wants to go even lower on the power consumtion, take the n100 is half the power consumption and still runs everything. If enclosed in this little cwwk 4port and 5 nvme case and I added 32gb ram, that is I think a better choice because more ram and zfs raid2 with still 3.6gbits.

Nice piece of hardware. Like you, I'm puzzled by an audio-only USB-C port. A full function USB-C or else the SD card reader from the R1 would have made more sense. For the NAS side of things, depending on home user needs, you could run a couple of external drives via the USB 3.1 ports. I just bought an 8TB one recently for not too much money. A couple of those on the 2 USB ports, would give plenty of storage for all your media.

How many 4K cameras can one throw onto a Frigate running on this? (:

That Core i3-N300 processor is very neat. Hopefully it will be available on mini-itx boards soon for diy applications.

Merry Christmas to you and the family 😊 You could add a usb wifi dongle for access point if pass through to opnsense.

Could you do the same "benchtest" on a Udoo Bolt V8? And could you cover some compatibility hiccups aswell?

FYI, the only hardware difference between the Atom class i3-N300/N305, and the Atom class N100, are the number of CPU cores enabled. The rest is firmware limitations to how fast the existing hardware runs Keep this in mind, this IS NOT a 12th/13th gen Core i3 part like the 1215u/1315u, instead it has no P cores and only E cores(like atoms of the past), has less than 1/2 the PCIe lanes at the slower previous gen speeds much like Atoms of the past, instead of supporting a theoretical 256-512GB of RAM in dual channel this has a firmware limit of single channel 16GB much like Atoms of the past(going over can cause issues in some cases), and despite the i3-1215u being lowest cut down part on the totem pole for Alderlake, the i3-N305 has 1/2 the GPU, much like Atoms of the past. Dont get me wrong, the N100, N200, N300, and N305 are great parts i have an N100 for my firewall, and an N305 for my steamcache, but they're only good as long as they're sold for a good price(like in this video, a complete computer for $399 is a good price) However according to Intel, the N305, is supposed to cost as much as a 1315U at $309 for just the chip, at least before they took down the MSP from the N305 ARK page. Thankfully most nanoPC builders are clearly not buying them at this price, because i've seen a full machine with N305, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB if RAM for $309, or the MSRP for just the chip itself, Oh, and it had a legit version of Windows 11 Pro

extremely cool piece of kit, thanks for your video. I was particularly interested to see the capability of pass-thru for NICs - something that is lacking on some hardware I've come across of this ilk that would otherwise require bare metal install of say pf-sense or similar. The ability to virtualise both firewall and other vms is great. I'd tend to go for 2, where the first would be pf-sense, the second a general purpose docker server or like you say, just LXC in proxmox - wehey ! Thanks again.

The idle powers seems a bit high for me. I have a NUC with a j4025 (i know its TDP is lower) with HA and more than 15 containers and in idle uses around 5 watts. For the form factor I would expect it to be more efficient since its going to be running 24/7. I know a lot of people dont care about their bills, but still..

Can you do a long video how to set up a smart home from start to Finnish?

How much additional protection does an opensense firewall provide if I already have a Unifi Dream Machine running at home? Does it make any sense at all?

I’ve been running a threadripper unpaid server for years but the electricity costs are starting to become noticeable. I’m thinking of downgrading to something less power hungry.

The lovely size and form factor, the power consumption and those 2.5Gbps i226v NICs are sweet... but 16GB RAM and no ECC are a missed opportunity. For a small server and few services it will do it, but it gets a little pricey if you choose the big flavour and add it a 2TB drive. I'll stick with B-Stock NUCs for the moment!

I wonder what it would take to reproduce a similar result with a mini cluster of Raspberry 5s. Specifically with idle power in mind.

Hi Lewis! How about booting from USB and using the m.2 slot to connect a GPU (something like a RTX2060 12GB) in order to run some LLMs (e.g. using ollama)? It's something I've been thinking about doing. A small, cheap(-ish), low power home AI rig.

Does it require Internet to function? What if your camping with no service in rang.

Could you show how do you have connected storage inside Proxmox? physically connected and then to VMs and LXCs

I just ordered so look forward to learning it all from your great video! thank you. Not at all sure on the setup as that alone is not easy to install the Proxmox which I did a practice try on a old laptop but got stuck on there ip section as that many ways to do a setup but I want to mostly be just getting Home assistant up and running and not servers quite yet! And a more stable local SmartHome when there is drop out in isp connections! would be good if you can do or do any setups to get a static IP address setup with using Cloudflare as that is also what I'm using too! And if possible through this connection with something like my setup with 2 ASUS RT-AX82U 5400 Dual Band router mesh? Thanks!

Is this device powerfull enough to do speech-to-text (Whisper) for Home Assistant with decent results?

Why do we need dedicate ethernet port for the management ? Also, why do we need another one for the VM traffic ? Can I connect the VM directly to the firewall as they run on the same host ?

did you run your router in a vm? thought that was a big no no?

I’ve not used proxmox, but I did get confused by references to the jellyfin container. I had assumed it was a VM running directly on proxmox and not a container running in a docker env. I guess I need to give proxmox a go…

I don't think quick sync cpu usage is shown as part of the cpu utilisation, intel gpu top will probably show very high usage. It would be nice if proxmox would show other hardware usage, lige GPU/s :)

Hello, this is Patrick from STH.

Could it be used with a DAS? Ideally don’t want to invest in a new server and nas

Would the R2 handle all of the functions in the video, plus Frigate NVR with 5-8 cameras?

getting a more indepth explenation on some of these components (especially opensence in my opinion) would be great haahaha. We've all seen an knwo how to instal HA. but for someone to who a "homelab" first sounded verry fague and dounting, but now potentially manegable, some more indepth explenations would be great 😁 open sense sounds really great, but combining sofware and hardware aint always the easiest to understand

Soldered on memory kills this for me, otherwise this looked like a great nuc killer

Can't I add a DAS and make it a NAS? Are there any downsides to it?

Great video. I'm currently using a NUC (13th gen) with proxmox to run services with jellyfin also. Can I ask the community here - what is the best way to connect some kind of NAS? Temporarily just an external USB drive, and down the line something like Synology - or is there a better way?

Soldered RAM is a bummer for something you want to serve as a hypervisor.

how's the fan noise?

Would you be able to connect to NAS for media storage ?

Emby on a LXC I may have to try that ? , I'm running a Asrock mini x300 , ryzen 5700g , 64 gb ram , 2 x 4tb ssd drives and a 2td nvme for proxmox system . Got Emby on a VM with 8gb ram and transcoding by brute force because it is hard to use hardware en/decoding without passing a video card to that VM , but I'm passing the VM both SSDs for a zfs mirror . Running more or less the same things, home automation , pfsense , influx , pihole , emby , samba , netboot-xyz , windows 10 and windows 11 unactivated for software testing and roll back . Was running Frigate on it too , but one of my h265 cameras would keep crashing the server if I passed it hardware en/decoding.

How could a usb port be audio only?! And you could use the other USB Port to add external storage storage

I’d go along with using that for as many services as’ll fit on it, but not running the firewall as well. You can isolate in software all you like, but it’s just not worth the risk to lump it all together. Hypervisors have bugs and do not offer the same security as using a dedicated appliance. Very interesting hardware though. Thanks for making this vid. I do think you needed a “I bought this with my own money blah blah”. Just to button it up.

so tiny and cute!!!!

No sata ports ?

N95 for proxmox is ... ... a risk At least with other brands with this cpu

My 15yo Atlhon server seeing this: "young people learns fast nowadays"

Well can't you technically increase storage capacity via usb hubs? Surely USB interface won't be as fast as NVME, but it's something.

Running a router is a VM is not ideal. Sure, it is doable and done in an emergency type situation, but you really should have your router as a separate, bare metal device for security and performance purposes. Teh definition of Home Lab has become very very loose these days. There are as many definitions as there are people. Home Lab use to be the people wanting to experiment at home and play with networking, which is where the lab part of it came from, these days anyone running a VM calls it a Home Lab. How times have changed :)

That device seems quite low spec for virtualisation, I mean you couldn’t run many machines, might be ok for one or two simply projects, but for more complicated labs I’d be surprised if it can cope.

its a security nightmare to run all that other stuff on the same device as firewall and router.. 😬

I love these, but HATE, that they use non-standard USB-C ports (meaning, Audio only? wtf... worse is the "USB-C" power port... ah, no it isn't you can't use a USB-C PD power supply on it, and worse, if you mistake the "USB-C Power" plug it comes with, for a standard USB-C power, it will send 12v to your device and well, ya, magic smoke for many things :( Should use standard DC Barrel jacks for power, and standard TRSS for audio!

the price is really not worth it , except the NIC's its somewhat subpar to any beelink/minis in same price range

Were you paid for this video? Did they send you the product or did you buy it? Edit to add: this review seems to completely neglect the similar offerings at lower price points. An n100 could comfortably handle all these workloads for half the price

I decided to check it out and went to the site for a price. To get a price it insisted that I had to add the spec to my shopping cart first and then refused to delete the item from the cart afterwards. With cheap stunts like this, I am not sure this is a company I would be comfortable doing business with.

I dont recommend anyone pack anything essential on these little largely proprietary SOC type hardware devices unless you have some responsible backup recovery plans in place or some ability to be able to obtain replacement parts quickly (like off the shelf). Its all well and good if you can run your setup on a 1watt calculator, but if getting parts are a c**t should something go wrong i bet you will spend all that energy saved money in loses trying to source replacement parts and doing RMA postage. Also, what the replacement parts cost like on these should something go wrong? Also, whats the long term reliability test like with these devices in general anyone know?

hi, my friend you have in "no link¨the link of the r2, maybe you lose money for that :)

you missed medical on your list! :-)

I don’t know , but it seems a bit pricy…

Do you set these up as a business? just asking, do not have the knowledge, I could learm,

While this is an amazing piece of tech, I cant see the cost benefit over a $150 mini-pc.

Realtek NICs = non starter :(

Orange Pi 5 Plus is better, and uses less wattage. Supports full size NVME.

I'm getting really tired of everyone and their brother raving about these mini PCS I agree that they are impressive however these mini PCS come from companies based in China several of which have strong ties to the CCP and absolutely no one who recommends them performs a firmware/bios dump to examine the code plugging any of these mini PCS into your home network could be a major security risk

You DO realize you can get USB HDD RAID enclosures, that take 2 or 4 HDDs and handle the RAID array themselves, right? All your homelab will see, will be a single mass storage device, plugged into one of its USB ports.

for this amount of money you can build a better server with i7 processor

Is this sponsored? Please disclose your relationship when doing hardware reviews

I trust Intel NOTHING! I bought N100, that according to Intel is up to 16GB RAM but see and tell me if this is true: CPU: Intel N100 (4) @ 3.400GHz GPU: Intel Alder Lake-N [UHD Graphics] Memory: 5318MiB / 31863MiB so exactly 32GB RAM installed and working ;-) and this model you are showing... kind of 2x too expensive considering the return value