First home lab plan uses a low-power mini PC, NAS, and 2.5GbE
The setup is for a first home lab in a new two-story house of about 1,600 square feet. The always-on hub is an Intel N150 mini PC with 32GB of memory and a 1TB . It is meant to run all day as the center of the lab and uses about 10 to 25 watts of power.
A separate Ryzen 9 desktop with 64GB of memory and an RTX 3080 is on the network mainly for gaming, but it is not part of the always-on server setup. Video editing happens on a MacBook Pro using for each project, not directly from the NAS. Storage is handled by a TerraMaster F4-425 NAS with four 16TB Seagate IronWolf drives, used for deep storage and a media library.
The large storage is mainly for video project backups that can be several each. For , the plan uses a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max instead of the Ultra because it has five 2.5GbE ports and about 2.3Gbps IDS/IPS . The internet connection starts with Xfinity 1 Gig, but the is chosen with a possible future move to 2-gig internet in mind.
Key points
- The always-on hub is an Intel N150 mini PC using about 10 to 25 watts.
- A separate gaming desktop is on the network but is not part of the always-on server stack.
- A TerraMaster F4-425 NAS with four 16TB drives stores video backups and media.
- Video editing is done on local MacBook Pro storage, not directly from the NAS.
- The network plan uses a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max for five 2.5GbE ports and future 2-gig internet headroom.