Why I Built a Homelab (And Haven’t Parted With It Since)

It started with movies. I loved collecting them, ripping them, organizing them. But Blu-ray rips eat storage fast, and suddenly I needed space - lots of it. 8TB drives were affordable, so the question became: what case holds a ton of drives without costing a fortune?

That question led me down the enterprise hardware rabbit hole. And once I started, I couldn’t stop.

The Evolution

Gen 1: The R720XD
My first “real” server. Enterprise-grade, tons of bays, cheap on the secondary market. Perfect, right? Wrong. The thing ran hot. Like, “can’t keep this in a 2-bedroom apartment” hot.

Gen 2: The Whitebox
Switched to consumer hardware in the biggest case I could find: Fractal Define 7 XL. Paired it with the X10DRi-T4+ motherboard - which barely fit. This thing was a workhorse for years.

Gen 3: NVMe Changes Everything
SSDs were dying from constant VM writes. NVMe prices finally dropped enough to justify the upgrade. Once I felt that speed? No going back.

Gen 4: The Big Upgrade
Bonus hit. Upgraded my nearly decade-old Xeons to an AMD EPYC 7532 and H12SSL-NT motherboard.

Lessons learned: Buy everything at once with a plan, especially networking. Buying piecemeal trying to make things work wastes so much money. But damn, that 7532 was fast - single CPU, no dual-socket scheduling headaches, ATX-sized board. Couldn’t ask for better.

The Failed Experiment: I tried cramming all that power into a micro-ATX case. It technically worked - two drives hanging off the roof, 12 HDDs and 6 SSDs crammed in. But no room for a decent GPU, and it ran louder. Almost immediately switched back.

What It Is Now

In short: I have a homelab because I ripped movies, needed somewhere to store them, and servers kept evolving with me.

Current setup:

Why I Keep It

That’s the thing about homelabs - they’re never “done.” The tinkering, the breaking things just to fix them, the rabbit holes like “let me upgrade to 2.5GbE” only to have my ISP limit me to 1Gbps anyway (story for another day).

In retrospect? I could’ve skipped the CPU/motherboard upgrade, gone cheaper, and put that money toward more drives. But hindsight’s 20/20, and honestly? The journey matters more than perfect efficiency.

This thing stores my movies. Runs my VMs. Lets me test infrastructure I don’t have access to at work. And yeah, it keeps evolving.

That’s why I haven’t parted with it since.

What I Actually Use It For

Beyond the media storage that started it all: