The original post: /r/homelab by /u/HDDVD4EVER on 2024-12-02 04:46:18.

I have a rack with a bunch of networking equipment and a single server right now - a Lenovo RD450 with 128GB DDR4 Ram, Dual Xeon E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz.

I got it for free, and it has served me really well for my needs. I’m running Proxmox with ~10 different containers. I’m using it for Home Assistant, ZoneMinder (planning to switch to Frigate), Samba/SMB, media/plex, etc. Nothing too crazy, Zoneminder is probably the single biggest hog of CPU and memory, but otherwise I doubt I’m using more than half the available resources on average.

That brings me to my problem, I need to drastically reduce the depth of my rack, and this server is huge. Its roughly 30" and ideally I’d like to have something < 20".

I have 2 empty slots in my rack so my first though was to look into doing a 4U shallow build, but I quickly got overwhelmed on the hardware choices and its starting to feel like what I have is overkill.

Unfortunately I also have a lot less free time now to tinker with my homelab, and with increasing WAF a lot of the tasks this server does are now “mission critical” in my household…

I’d like to keep it all contained in one machine, and I need at least 5 drives (RAID 1, an SSD, and a disk for the NVR), but now I’m wondering if I should just buy something off the shelf like a dedicated NVR for Frigate/Zoneminder and some HP elitedesks, or some small form factor computer. Or maybe a consumer build in a rack-mountable case?

I guess my questions boil down to this:

• Would pretty much any i5/i7 consumer grade CPU be a massive improvement over my current Xeons? Any reason to go for a newer Xeon vs an i5/i7?

• Given a budget of ~$1000 and 4 available units of space in the rack, what approach would you take? One big box? A consumer grade build? Any other off the shelf options worth looking at?

TIA