Moving the homelab to another country (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have an R320 that has 4 SAS drives 10TB each, which holds a lot of my data + backups from other systems, I also have an R710 which runs a lot of heavy workloads for my homelab, now I have to move to the other side of the EU and I don't know what to do with that lab, the electricy cost on the new country will be around 0.33c per Kw, while now I was paying under .10c.

Here are the options that I have considered

Take R320 with me As the SAS drives are in a unique configuration in xcp-ng it would be the safest option to transport the drives in a secure case with me and have the R320 moved to the new country, where I will set it up again and have some of my VMs and data.

Make current pc the new server I have a quite powerful and recent pc build from 4 years ago, I was thinking of buying SAS pcie interfaces for my PC so I can cinvert it to a server and be able to read the SAS drives, but this is a bit expensive and requires me to buy a new computer for my self.

Also, as I won't be keeping the R710, I was thinking of buying a few lenevo sff mini PCs and setting up a low power virtualization cluster and using the R320 or my PC as the storage medium.

I have also backed up everything to storj and the most important data are also synced to a few cloud storage providers for safe keeping.

How would you handle something like that? Would you start from scratch or try to bring as much as you can? I plan to invest at max 1k in rebuilding if needed but I would like to avoid it if possible, the SAS drives are enterprise grade and bought just a year ago so I would like to keep using them.

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[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

What kind of workload? It might be cheaper to run some stuff in the cloud.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I have a baremetal server at hetzner but I like to have some stuff locally for full control of the data, + if I forget to pay a cloud bill my data won't be lost.

I run over 80 services locally, in total homelab and cloud I run over 220 services, some are duplicate docker containers DBs and HA systems, but primarily I have replaces any SaaS product that I used with self hosted alternatives.

My current pc with some extra ram should be enough to handle the basic workloads, and in the future an SFF should be able to fully cover my needs.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

So, the R320 is just for bulk storage?

Personally I'd drop that one for the lowest power consumption box I could find... unless it's part of a (V)SAN for your R710?

But be careful with assuming many SFF PCs will be better than 1x R710, consider their power properly as they might be more expensive... servers ~~are~~ can be more efficient at heavier loads

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Basically yes, I use the 4 SAS drives for bulk storage, 40TB raw/20TB on RAID10 for backups and media storage, + I run some VMs on an ssd disk that I installed in the DVD bay.

The R710 has 12 cores across 2 CPUs and 192 GB of ram, my workloads are primarily RAM heavy, I run over 50 services on the homelab.

The R710 uses around 160w on average, while the R320 uses 80w.

The SFF PCs should draw under 40w each, sonfor the some power consumption I should be able to get 4 SFF PCs with more CPU cores but a bit less memory.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Another option: sell both Dells, get a new used one wherever you end up which can then fulfill both roles. Especially the 710 gets a bit long in the tooth.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

That's something that I thought too, the R710 is over 12 yo, the R320 is starting to be considered old even for the homelab, the Rx30 series is fairly priced, the Rx40 series is still pretty expensive.

Maybe 2 R430s would be good, I will have to check noise and power consumption, but even one R430 should be more powerful that a few SFFs.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

That’s a bummer of a price difference for electricity. I think using the R320 for storage and adding some Lenovo sff units makes a lot of sense. I have one of the Lenovos in my hodgepodge virtualization cluster and it has been rock solid (as has my R320 in providing storage).

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Yup, right now I consume ~650kw, double than the average house, it comes at 130€ per month (total consumption with 2ACs, PC and the 2 servers) unfortunately I will not be able to pay more than 150€ for electricity.

That swhat I was thinking, the R320 is still quite good and can also run some VMs until I save a few money and get some lenovos or convert my computer to a server.

Btw, I have notices that when I run VMs with big disks (over 400GB) using NFS from the R320 to the R710 through a 1gb Ethernet on xcp-ng, some times the filesystem will fail and remount into read only, have this happened to you too? Or was something wrong with my network/config?

this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025

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