Comment by thrw87438734756

It's always tempting to fiddle and expand, but my "homelab" has been my "old" Macbook Air M1 16GB on a Dell Thunderbolt Dock for many years. That thing runs about 30 containers with stuff like Paperless, Navidrome, BirdNET, SearxNG, Home Assistant, Frigate, Open-Code, arr-Stack, Nginx, Jellyfin and the like, serves as my DNS server, has about 15TB of SSD storage attached and is completely silent while using ridiculously little energy. I don't have exact figures at hand, but my whole "tech corner" power bar including router, landline phone, a hand full of IoT gateways, server, storage and an audio amp is between 40 and 55W most of the time. I do have my desktop configured as an optional and not always-on server node for Ollama, audio analysis and other high-power tasks. Even if I wanted those as always-on services, I think I would rather go for a Mac Studio than a rack setup at home and simulate some blinkenlights for the emotional aspect in a nice 3d printed case for the Mac and the storage. :D