When I first started homelabbing, I chased the biggest, most powerful enterprise gear I could find. However, I quickly realized that running rack-mounted servers 24/7 is noisy, hot, and expensive. Today, my philosophy focuses on efficiency and sustainability.
Custom SuperMicro NAS
Handles 99% of daily workload. Uses an Intel i3-7100 for low power consumption and Quick Sync video transcoding.
Dell PowerEdge R710
Dual Xeon X5660s (24 Threads). Kept powered off (Cold Lab) and only booted to test new services before production deployment.
2012 Mac Mini
Runs PfSense, WireGuard, and HAProxy. Draws a fraction of the power of a rack-mount firewall while handling gigabit throughput.
I architected three physically separate ZFS pools to isolate workloads and prevent camera write-streams from slowing down media reads.
My Minecraft Server is accessible to the world, but VLAN rules prevent it from initiating connections to my personal devices. If the server is compromised, the rest of the network remains secure in a digital DMZ.
To prevent the internet from "breaking" if the server goes down, I run a secondary DNS on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ on a separate circuit.
I use nebula-sync to keep blocklists identical across both instances.