Depends on the docker containers but it’s way overkill than you might think.

Since you’re starting it may be worth looking into used office PCs like the thinkcentre from Lenovo or other brands(no tiny or ssf since they don’t have to room for drives). They often offer good perfomance for the price and the power consumption is not too high.

16GB of ram is a bit low for the load you’re planning. That can work, but Nextcloud and Immich are pretty hungry for memory. My immich instance right now is using 7GB of RAM and nextcloud uses a bit over 4. I have the hardware to give them pretty much all the memory they want, so those are not absolute minimum amounts, but I wouldn’t try to run either with less than 6GB allocated memory on my load (few users, about a terabyte of data on both).

With 16GB you can pretty much forget using ZFS, but that’s not a big loss. LVM works just fine and with thin provisioning you can use snapshots too just fine. Bigger SSD/NVME for drive cache would be good. And of course all-SSD setup would be nice, but that gets expensive pretty fast. Second ethernet port might be nice to have, depends on how you’re planning to build your setup. Otherwise that hardware looks pretty good, altough I’d search for something second hand. CPU is most likely a bit overkill for what you need, I have Xeon E5-2620 v3 @ 2.40GHz and it’s running on around 10% load most of the time.

Yes it will be fine. Much will depend on what OS you will run and in turn how you want to do storage. NAS drives might not be necessary if you going to use software defined storage. If in your budget consider a CPU with more cores for virtualization and docker.

Overall nothing wrong with that configuration. But if you really get into all the awesome stuff you can self host your two constraints are RAM and CPU cores.

FYI: I’m a noob myself.

Looks fine, but if you’re looking to mess around with a first build then you could go cheaper. Secondhand hardware would save you money, especially since older hardware is great for server use. At least you’re saving money with AM4 and DDR4.

Some thoughts:

• I went with an Intel CPU for Jellyfin transcoding.
• 16gb ram is enough to start and I host tons of stuff with that much, but the more ram the better. Having 2 more ram slots for future expansion would serve you well (but not essential).
• Faster networking would be better. Your mobo has 1 gigabit LAN. Again not a deal breaker. You can add faster networking yourself later.

This guy makes great videos, but you have to be careful to not overcomplicate things or chase specs that pro home server guys want that make no difference to noobs.

Just about anything is OK for a server, I use whatever hardware I get from work thats being decommissioned.

The biggest limit I see is the ram. Depending on what you spin up and how, it’ll be the tightest budget per service.

I would probably go Intel with iGPU for the transcoding and acceleration for Immich. i3-14100 is fast and cheap.

Otherwise you definitely have far more CPU power than you’ll need for those apps so no worries there.

Your part list is extremely similar to my main home server. You’ll do just fine with the hardware you’ve selected. It is a GREAT starting point.

For context I have been running an AMD 5600g alongside 32gb gskill ddr4 RAM since covid, tho back then it was a 2600x paired with an ancient FirePro for graphics. Boot drive is m.2 ssd and I have 4 hand-me-down enterprise HDDs for storage. (I originally was using whatever spinning rust I already had on-hand at that time, but I have replaced them since)

Massive overkill!

That’s a great Home Theater PC. Hook it up to your TV and install KDE Plasma (distro of your choice 👍) then just crank up the global desktop zoom to like 225% and get:

• A real wireless mouse that has a long range (e.g. $10 TEKNET cheapo deal with 10% off coupon today, LOL! a.co/d/02qG1oHO )
• A wireless keyboard/trackpad combo that’s made for that kind of thing (they’re all terrible keyboards—it’s only purpose is to get you through the boot menu/rescue process if something horrible goes wrong). Use SSH for doing any real work on the thing.

Now install Docker and all the containers/servers you want!

I have a ~14yo HTPC with a mostly modern GPU (8GB) that only has 8GB of RAM and four cores on some old AMD CPU. It’s running four separate servers for my self-host purposes and it doesn’t break a sweat.

Follow up question: Do I need a separate CPU cooler, or is the boxed Wraith enough? And how loud is it? I can’t really find info on that.

Your server looks fabulous, and I’m not discouraging you from pursuing it in the least. However, if I may draw from my own personal experience and what I am currently running, it may give you some ideas. Currently, I am running 53 containers on a Optiplex 7020 SFF with the i7-4790 and 32 GB RAM. Just checked and it’s load average at this moment is: 0.47, 0.60, 0.73. Meaning it’s pretty much in an idle state except for logging in just now. Grand total cost was less than $200. It consumes about $8 USD/month.

Unless you’re going to get into selfhosting heavy AI models, most stock PC, office discards, etc built in the last 10 years will do just fine for a homelab, with a little love like some additional RAM or a dual nic card. Immich and Nextcloud will probably require a bit more than 16 GB RAM running together. I don’t run Immich, but I do run Nextcloud and it does just fine with the above set up. No lags, stutters, etc.

One thing you may want to explore is your OS. If you want to do what you suggested with a NAS OS like TrueNAS or Unraid. They can take advantage of a ssd cache. One small regular ssd for your OS, storage on your hdd array, and a NAS quality ssd that essentially runs your docker containers that gets backed up to your array.

It’s not nessesary. But if it’s something you think you might want to do in the future, you’ll want a plan for it now. Make sure you have enough mobo connections, and space in your case or an idea on how you would want to expand.

If you’re already going for spinning rust hard disks, why limit yourself to the 3 TB ones? IMHO, these days, spinning rust only makes sense at 8 TB+ per disk.

I have used a laptop without a screen as a server, raspberry pis, 10 year old laptop, proliant server, something with a via itx motherboard and a cheap cpu, like literal trash. So yeah your build is more than fine. Don’t stress your budget too much, but if you can afford this you will have better than my first “server”. Remember to have fun with it!

16GB RAM may be a bit low for the setup, as others have suggested, but I’m currently running Immich and Nextcloud and a handful of other small services (like FMD) dockerized in an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5. I’ve experienced very few issues. In my opinion, you could find a used Ryzen 3600 or even older, and 16GB will probably serve you just fine. You could save yourself a hundred bucks or more.

That said, what you’ve got here is nice and future-proof for quite a while, even if you end up going down the rabbit hole. You might eventually need another 16GB of RAM, but maybe not until after the AI bubble pops 🙂

I have a similar setup with the same case haha recently built as well. Your use-case will be more than fine. My only suggestion, aside from try and get more RAM. If those hard-drives are in a redundant raid setup, and you don’t already have one, get a backup drive too. Especially if the price for the drive IA decent. Last thing you want to do is to buy a replacement drive later when prices are jacked up or have to do the RMA process with only 3 drives running your data.

You can get Ryzen 5650G Pro from ebay that will support ECC. Just make sure it’s not vendor locked.

Obviously you’d need to adjust mobo, not sure if Gigabyte supports ecc. Asrock was pretty cool with ECC.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #71 for this comm, first seen 2nd Aug 2026, 22:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

2 of my 4x 4TB spinning drives are portable. 2 in mirrored raid, and on-site backup, and an off-site backup. If you don’t have it on 3 drives across two sites, you don’t have it. 5400RPM is fine as long as you allocate some of that NVMe as a cache for it. Keep all high-transaction stuff like databases, thumbnail caches and indexes on the NVMe drive. Going to 7200RPM just increases power consumption and noise, and reduces reliability.

The other specs seems fine, but I personally upgrade my desktop then take the old CPU, RAM and motherboard to use for my server.

Immich and Nextcloud run fine on my 2015 Core i5 with 16GB RAM.

Might be abit much but double your ram if you intend on using a lot of apps

innodb_buffer_pool_size = 8G
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2
innodb_log_file_size = 2G
innodb_log_buffer_size = 32M
innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct = 90
innodb_io_capacity=5000
innodb_io_capacity_max=20000
innodb_read_io_threads=8
innodb_write_io_threads=8
query_cache_type = 1
query_cache_limit = 2M
query_cache_min_res_unit = 2k
query_cache_size = 128M
tmp_table_size= 128M
max_heap_table_size= 128M

[mysqld]
max_connections = 200
character_set_server = utf8mb4
collation_server = utf8mb4_general_ci
transaction_isolation = READ-COMMITTED
binlog_format = ROW
innodb_file_per_table=1
# Increase open files based limits.conf value
open_files_limit=65535

shared_buffers = 6GB
work_mem = 20MB
maintenance_work_mem = 2GB
maintenance_io_concurrency = 200
max_worker_processes = 14 
max_parallel_workers_per_gather = 4
max_parallel_maintenance_workers = 4
max_parallel_workers = 12

synchronous_commit = off
commit_delay = 300

checkpoint_timeout = 30min
max_wal_size = 60GB
min_wal_size = 4GB

I have that same case in black, overall very similar setup. I like how it looks, but if I would change one thing in my server it would be the case. It’s quite a hassle to work inside of, and for its size, only being able to hotswap 4 HDDs is very little compared to other cases you can find.

It’s not bad by any means, but you can get better

I made a very similar build almost 2 years ago.

I did not like the Jonsbo N4. The HDD temps were bad. The case amplified HDD noise and was a pain to build in. I used a Silverstone SFX power supply. I had two of those PSUs fail in less than a year.

After the second expensive SFX PSU failed, I decided I did not want to buy another. I changed cases to the Fractal Design Node 804 and bought an inexpensive ATX PSU. I have been much happier with my build after those changes. My HDD temps dropped by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The case is much quieter and I was impressed by the quality.

I humbly disagree with others that 16 Gigz of ram is not enough. A. For the first server it is definitely enough, before you know what you really need. B. In current rampocalypse it would be crazy buying ram without knowing that you really need it (only for it to sit there unused later). Your setup is fine and only time and your inner hobbyist selfhoster will tell later what you need.

Edit: and fyi I curretly do have 48 Gigz 😂, bought it a year ago very cheap and my system uses 10. Therefore I have set a high ARC to 16 GB. I used to try local LLM but didn’t find it useful for the high power consumption. Just wanted to show you where my opinion come from. Nowadays I wouldn’t buy more than strictly necessary.