# Building a Consumer-Parts Homelab Server

A homelab writeup from cleberg.net on moving from desktops and a Raspberry Pi to a single dedicated server. The author first bought a used Dell R720XD, found it too loud and its CPU/RAM too dated, returned it, and built a quiet server from modern consumer PC parts instead — and is much happier with the result.

## The build

- **Case:** Rosewill RSV-R4100U 4U rackmount (chosen over hot-swap-bay cases at 3–4× the price; the tradeoff is unscrewing the HDD cage to add drives)
- **Board/CPU:** NZXT B550 + AMD Ryzen 7 5700G — picked specifically for onboard Radeon graphics, so no discrete GPU needed
- **RAM:** 64GB (2×32GB), board maxes at 128GB
- **Storage:** 500GB NVMe boot drive; 10TB + 8TB shucked WD White drives migrated from the old server, plus 2×8TB WD Red Plus bought on Black Friday
- **PSU:** Corsair RM850; Noctua fans replacing the stock case fans
- **Software:** Alpine Linux, most services in Docker, no VMs, very few bare-metal services. Handles 4K Plex streaming easily. First build ever, ~3 hours.

## The lesson worth keeping: check fan direction

The one real mistake was airflow. The front 120mm intake fan — sitting right in front of the HDD bay — was installed backwards, blowing air *out* of the case. All four drives idled at ~44–46°C (`smartctl -a /dev/sdX | grep Temperature_Celsius`); only the 10TB drive nearest the case fan ran cooler at 38°C. Flipping the fan to actually intake dropped every drive to ~31–33°C immediately. A single fan spinning the wrong way cost 10–15°C of idle drive temperature. Cheap, catastrophic-if-unnoticed, and invisible until you look at SMART data.

## Where it sits

A consumer-parts, container-first counterpoint to the enterprise/virtualization homelab approach. Compare [[toolbox/pve-microvm]] and [[toolbox/proxmox-manager]] for the Proxmox-and-VMs school (this build deliberately avoids VMs), and the broader microVM/isolation cluster in [[microvm]] / [[sandboxing-ai-agents]] for when container-only isolation isn't enough. The practical takeaway — verify airflow direction against SMART temperatures before racking — generalizes to any DIY build.