Building My Homelab — A 360TB Enterprise-Grade Home Server
Coming Soon — Help Me Write This Article!
I'm putting together a detailed article about building my homelab server. To make sure I capture everything accurately, here are the questions I'll be answering. Check back soon for the full story.
The Questions
Motivation
What motivated me to build this server?
What problem was I trying to solve?
Planning & Research
How long did the research and planning take?
Where did I learn about ZFS, TrueNAS, and RAID configurations?
The Build
How long was the actual build process?
What was the hardest part (cable management, BIOS config, HBA setup, ZFS config)?
Did anything go wrong during the build? Lessons learned?
Hardware Specs
The server runs on some serious hardware:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X
RAM: 192GB DDR5 5600MHz ECC UDIMM (4 × 48GB Kingston Server Premier)
Plex GPU: Intel Arc B580 (hardware transcoding)
VM GPU: Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti (GPU passthrough)
Storage (SSD): 2 × 500GB boot (mirror) + 2 × 4TB app (mirror)
Storage (HDD): 18 × 20TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro (360TB raw, 240TB usable via 3× RAIDZ2)
HBA: Broadcom BCM 9600-24i
PSU: Corsair AX1600i (1600W)
Case: Fractal Design Define 7 XL
Cooling: Noctua NH-D15 G2 + 6 × NF-A14x25 G2 fans
UPS: APC SRT3000XLI (3000VA) + APC BV500I (router)
Software & Services
OS: TrueNAS SCALE
Filesystem: ZFS (3× RAIDZ2 vdevs)
VM: Windows 11 Pro
Services I run — Plex, game servers, VMs, containers, and more (details coming)
Power & Reliability
What's the total power draw?
Why the 3000VA UPS + separate router UPS?
Future Plans
Any upgrades planned? More drives, networking changes, new services?
Stay Tuned
I'll be filling in these sections with the full story, photos, and lessons learned. Check back soon!