Home lab for Freelance projects
This home lab service has been build to host the coming Nabla company projects and services.
One physical Mini-ITX system running TrueNAS Scale: dependable ZFS storage plus a homelab host for apps, home automation, security tooling, and compute-heavy tasks—including AI-style workloads when you need them.
- ZFS & datasets Pools, snapshots, replication
- Homelab host Apps, VMs, internal services
- Security stack Tooling & monitoring
- AI & compute AM5 headroom for models & jobs
After seven years of good service, my FreeNAS server died. The goal is to extend the setup beyond a NAS alone: a homelab on TrueNAS Scale, with applications for domotics such as Home Assistant, plus security and AI tooling, as listed below on this page.
Bill of materials
Reused
- Case: previous iXsystems chassis, should be 170 mm × 170 mm, mini-ITX format
- PSU: previous 200 W power supply
- Kingston SKC600MS mSATA SSD — 256 GB TLC 3D NAND. 83 €
- Storage: 4× Western Digital Red WD30EFRX — 3 TB each, SATA 6 Gb/s
New purchases
- MSI MPG B650I Edge WiFi — Mini-ITX AM5, DDR5, PCIe 4.0, M.2, Wi‑Fi 6E (Ryzen 7000 desktop). 174.67 €
- ORICO mSATA SSD enclosure (USB 3.0, 5 Gbps) — toolless adapter for 50×30 mm mSATA SSDs, up to 2 TB. 17.99 €
- Noctua NH-L9a-AM5 — low-profile CPU cooler for AMD AM5.
- AMD Ryzen 7 7700 — 3.8 GHz, 32 MB L3. 212.75 €
- Crucial DDR5 64 GB 5600 MHz — CL46 (CT64G56C46U5; also 5200/4800 MHz). 679.00 €
Total price 1 084.41 € Sum of motherboard, enclosure, CPU, and RAM. CPU cooler line has no price here.
Room to add later
- Another 64 GB RAM — DDR5 UDIMM, form factor 288-pin DIMM / UDIMM (desktop unbuffered modules). When shopping, do not mix up SO-DIMM (laptop format) or RDIMM (registered server format): they will not fit this board.
- NVMe SSD — extra M.2 NVMe drive for fast pool or cache-style storage (pick a model that matches your board’s M.2 specs and planned use).
