My homelab unexpected journey
From a working corner, entertainment setup to Plex media server and self-host services.
The New Corner
Back in June 2021, I moved to a new apartment and had a dedicated room to host all of my working equipments. I tried to keep it compact with an adjustable desk, Macs and a monitor.
In the left corner, I have a Xiaomi projector, which was my main source of entertainment. Months later, I added to this setup a RX-V6A AVR and a 5.1.2 sound system of Jamo speakers. This room became a home theatre and the last piece was a Nvidia Shield TV Pro player I bought in 2022.
I was quite satisfied with my setup, I have my works done during daytime and enjoy Netflix movies TV shows at night, all in the same room. I kept it that way and not much changed in the next 2 years.
The Gaming PC
My works require macOS, and not many games can be installed on my computer, the obvious solution was to have a game console to fill the gap. I did buy a PS5 in late 2023, and it served me well for a couple of AAA games (God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, PES). But I really wanted to have better FPS games as well (Dota 2, CS2) and a gaming PC is inevitable.
Early in this year (2024), I did acquire a gaming PC which was a budget one. Back then, I didn't have much knowledge on how to build a PC, I simply picked one based on recommendations from the internet. My PC had the ASUS B660M motherboard, 512GB SSD, 16GB RAM, Intel 12400F CPU and Nvidia RTX 3070ti GPU, coupled with it is a 240hz 1440p monitor (MSI MAG274QRX).
The new PC worked really well with my existing sound system; I had a really cool corner for gaming after adding a few RGB gadgets.
The Xiaomi projector was replaced with a BenQ TK700 4K; it improved the image quality of my movies and AAA games quite alot.
My setup became so overkill at this level, but I couldn't resist it. I had a really good time with gaming for a few months, but when the joys faded out I started to regret.
The Media Server
During May 2024, it became so time consuming to play games, and I could not afford it anymore. I still enjoyed the great movies with the current home theatre setup, but the gaming PC became a waste, I have no more energy and free time to put into gaming.
I searched for other uses for my Windows PC, and Plex media server was the first to stand out. I also discovered Hyper-V, which can host Ubuntu VMs; but at this point I wanted to keep things simple and decided to host my media server on Windows.
Had Plex media server in mind; I turned my attention to the PC components. The 512GB SSD was clearly not enough for the media server; I had 6TB external hard drives but that storage ran out quickly. I wanted to extend my PC storage with more external drives, I went for a search for some good options, and it turned out there are more budget choices with internal HDDs. I learned that I can extend the PC storage with SATA (I had no ideas about PC setup back then), and discovered that there are 4 SATA ports on my PC motherboard.
This soon became very exciting; I bought a 16TB WD Ultrastar HDD (2nd) with a really good price but then struggled to make it works. I figured out that, beside connecting to a SATA port for data transfer, I also need to connect the HDD with a power source; which was not the case for my external drives because they only need a USB port for both power and data transfer. I felt so dumb for not knowing this, I got no clues where to attach the power source to the drive.
Scratched my head while watching tutorials on Youtube, I discovered that the HDD power source is not coming from the motherboard but from the PSU. I had never paid attention to this part of my PC (beside the number of Watts), which suddently became so important. I removed the back cover of my PC case to discover that there are many more cables coming from the PSU, these cables are always hidden inside the PC case for a cleaner look. I finally found the SATA power cable, plug it to the HDD and plug the HDD data cable to the motherboard. The moment I successfully made my Windows to recognize the new HDD was really satisfied.
From this point, I added 2 more HDDs and a SATA SSD to fully utilize the 4 SATA ports, I have totally 50TB of storage for my media server. I moved from Netflix, Spotify, Kodi to Plex as the single app to consume most of media. There are more opensource tools to manage and enhance the media server, some are not right to share widely.
What next?
The media server was an attempt to add more uses for my gaming PC; on the journey to complete it, I discovered a new term: self-host, which became the next interesting part of my homelab journey. By adding more HDDs, I also discovered new capability of the motherboard, I can extend it through the PCIe lanes and host more cool things, which led to more computer rigs added to my homelab. My self-host services involved more technical efforts and Windows was no longer sufficient, this was when Linux Virtual Machines came into place.
vmh