Home Server Breakdown

A lot of my life revolves around practicality and habit. I mean, even the car I daily drive is a reliable and practical commuter with no fancy options, no sub-3-second launches, and no premium gas. It just works! Starts right up after ten years and still going.

Well, I’m saying this beforehand because it ties into the reasons I chose the current hardware for the home NAS upgrade. For two years now, I’ve been running a Dell Inspiron 660 as my TrueNAS server loaded with 16 TB of magnetic raw storage. And that’s been pretty cool except for the thermal management and selfish design Dell does around its hardware.

Proprietary motherboards, little wiggle room for PSU upgrades, and so on. Let’s even assume noise wasn’t an issue (sike). It’s been a reliable buddy that got me started on Linux, dockerization, and all the fun discoveries we find down the homelab rabbit hole. I even created my first SMB share on this clunker, something that we’ll get into later.

At the time of writing this article, I’ve moved all my disks from the old Dell desktop to a Fractal Design Node 304 spec build. I’m happier with my current setup, but I have to say it still has its own flaws that we’ll get into in a sec.

The Guts

I chose the ASRock Z390M motherboard mostly because of the dual 1-gig ethernet configuration. This could enable me to turn on port aggregation for faster transfer speeds. On top of that, I have more headroom if I ever wanted to set up Proxmox as a virtual container since it requires separate uplink/downlink interfaces.

Bringing everything together

The requirements for this build were simple. I have no need for a 2.5G or 10G interface yet. If that need ever arises, a few used options like the Asus Single Port 10GB RJ45 NIC exist on eBay and Facebook Marketplace.

For purposes of transcoding my locally stored media, the Intel 9500 is more than capable of transcodes up to 4K on Plex and Jellyfin relying only on integrated graphics. This was such a relief considering the size of the build and current GPU prices.

It’s cute!.. but not without its flaws.

Folks that have built computers for a while may have a different opinion, but my build wasn’t smooth sailing all the way. The Fractal Design has its shortcomings even if it was way ahead of its time in 2019. In case anyone is considering building the same form factor, you’d be better off with a Jonsbo N4 case or something current.

For some reason, the motherboard couldn’t POST with all chassis fan headers connected. But it works perfect when no fans are connected. I’m left to suffer through fans that run all the time since intelligent cooling is controlled through BIOS. In case anyone knows how I can get this working, please let me know.

General overview

I topped off the build with a fresh TrueNAS install and recovered databases to the original configuration. And loaded Jellyfin media server, which has been my preferred media server for a while. There are no significant spikes in CPU usage when streaming media. The 9500 still handles like a champ in 2026.

The system is an improvement to the homelab experience at a fraction of most off-the-shelf home storage solutions. Additionally, a lot can be tinkered with and there are no finicky workarounds to functions and features that would be locked behind paywalls.

Until next time, I’m Solomon Jjingo

Happy tinkering…