Somehow I’m only now realizing that I had not yet made a single post in this thread… My lab has gone through a significant change over this last year, that I feel I might as well sum up all of the changes in one post.
Homelab start of year in review
Networking
| Component | Selection |
|---|---|
| Router | Unifi Dream Machine Pro |
| Primary Switch | Unifi Pro Max 16 |
| PoE Switch | TP-Link TL-SG3210XHP-M2 |
| AP | U7 Pro Max |
TortiseCove (Primary Server)
| Component | Selection |
|---|---|
| Case | be quiet! Silent Base 601 Orange |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 5950x |
| GPU | Intel ARC a750 LE |
| RAM | Corsair Vengeance LPX 128GB (4x32GB) DDR4 3600 C18 |
| PSU | Corsair RM850x |
| Boot Pool | 2x SK Hynix P31 2TB (Mirrored) |
| Data Pool | 7x Seagate Exos x18/x20 18TB 7.2K (RaidZ2) |
Homelab 2025 in review:
Networking
To start, I had doubled my AP count with another U7 Pro Max, this would be short lived however. Later in the year, I ended up replacing both of the switches with a single Unifi Pro HD 24 PoE, and replaced one of the APs with a Unifi U7 XGS. Also finally rack mounted everything, and added a keystone patch panel to improve the cable routing.
KaijuAlpha (TortiseCove Ascended)
To start things off, went with a whole platform upgrade, sourced an AMD Epyc 7543 (32 cores, 256MBs of L3 cache), Asrock Rack ROMED8-2T board, and 8 x 32GB RDIMMS (256GB total, 3200mhz, single rank). Another major change was the upgrade to the Intel ARC PRO B50, the already blazing fast transcoding of the Alchemist based GPU was one upped by quite a margin in the recent Battlemage GPUs. I had only been expecting better system stability and power draw, along with the potential of future SR-IOV usage, so that was a pleasant surprise. As for the name, I had needed to keep both the old and new proxmox installs active during the transition, and I had already used the updated naming scheme on my Strix Halo box (KaijuBeta) and the work MacBook (KaijuDelta), so figured this would make things consistent.
Lastly the storage, boot drives were replaced with a new mirror setup of SK Hynix P41 2TB drives, primary difference here is the PCIe 3.0 → 4.0 uplift and new NAND. My primary data pool was also expanded from 7x18TB, to an eight drive via the recently added Raid-Z Expansion feature merged into OpenZFS, quite handy and smooth to use. With the increased PCIe lanes and Asus Hyper Cards from Den, had the opportunity to setup a special vdev onto the pool, which would move all file metadata (And files under a size limit) onto SSDs, allowing much faster resolving of file info, and even file access. This is currently setup up to a strip of two vdevs, each having a single Micron P510 2TB and Micron P705 2TB mirrored. Just got in two WD_BLACK SN7100 2TB, which I intend to expand both vdevs to a three drive mirror setup. Ironically, got both Micron drives just before they left the consumer market, so explains why these PCIe 5.0 drives were cheaper than PCIe 4.0 counterparts. (I am aware of the P510 being dramless, and that I am limiting the potential of the both Micron variants as these are both attached via PCIe 4.0) The smarter use of these SSDs for others would have definitely been to make a dedicated pool, but I had my reasons.
