I get asked a lot about what hardware I recommend for homelabs and home servers. It’s a very difficult question since it depends on what exactly you want to get out of your setup. But, whatever you choose, I’m starting a new series where I’ll setup all of the commonly requested home server software in a single box. Since I want to try this on both used and new hardware, here’s a low cost NAS you can buy brand-new and run your own software on it!

A few basics of this guy:

  • Terramaster F2-223 - F2 means 2-slot cube form factor, -2 is dual core, 23 is the ’new’ series (at least when this video was produced)
  • Intel Celeron N4505 dual core
  • Dual DDR4 sodimm slots, comes with 1x 4G stick and one easily accessible empty slot. I added an 8G stick to bring it up to 12G so I can do virtualization
  • Dual Intel I225-v3 2.5G NICs

A few upsides:

  • They are pretty cheap for the HW you get new
  • Mix of SATA and NVMe storage options, for bulk storage and high speed storage
  • x86 processor so it can run Linux based OSes well
  • Intel I225 2.5Gbe NIC is considered ‘good’ compared to Realtek chipsets, and widely compatible across OSes such as Linux and BSD

A few downsides:

  • The included software seems to want to install itself on your drive as the boot disk, but I was unable to get it to do so in a short amount of time so I gave up and installed Proxmox (which I was planning on doing anyway)
  • The internal USB seems to perpetually change some BIOS/UEFI settings back to default, removing it fixed all of the issues I had getting it to boot Proxmox properly
  • The second RAM stick is harder to get to, although I don’t think you realistically need more than 12G of RAM to go with this much CPU power. Maybe it would matter more for the quad-core version

This video is part of the Ultimate Home Server Megaproject

Contents⌗

Video⌗

Click on the thumbnail to watch the video: Thumbnail

  • Terramaster F2-223: Product Page or On Amazon - Note: You should also consider the quad-core versions if you want to do some virtualization, so you’d want a model with the -423 suffix (F2-423, F4-423, U4-423).
  • The RAM I bought: On Amazon
  • Only one stick of RAM if you don’t want to buy a pair: On Amazon
  • Try to find an HP Microserver like mine: On eBay

Some links to products may be affiliate links, which may earn a commission for me.

Hardware Information⌗

lscpu⌗ 

Architecture:                    x86_64
CPU op-mode(s):                  32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order:                      Little Endian
Address sizes:                   39 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
CPU(s):                          2
On-line CPU(s) list:             0,1
Thread(s) per core:              1
Core(s) per socket:              2
Socket(s):                       1
NUMA node(s):                    1
Vendor ID:                       GenuineIntel
CPU family:                      6
Model:                           156
Model name:                      Intel(R) Celeron(R) N4505 @ 2.00GHz
Stepping:                        0
CPU MHz:                         2899.952
CPU max MHz:                     2900.0000
CPU min MHz:                     800.0000
BogoMIPS:                        3993.60
Virtualization:                  VT-x
L1d cache:                       64 KiB
L1i cache:                       64 KiB
L2 cache:                        1.5 MiB
L3 cache:                        4 MiB
NUMA node0 CPU(s):               0,1
Vulnerability Itlb multihit:     Not affected
Vulnerability L1tf:              Not affected
Vulnerability Mds:               Not affected
Vulnerability Meltdown:          Not affected
Vulnerability Mmio stale data:   Vulnerable: Clear CPU buffers attempted, no microcode; SMT disabled
Vulnerability Retbleed:          Not affected
Vulnerability Spec store bypass: Mitigation; Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl
Vulnerability Spectre v1:        Mitigation; usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization
Vulnerability Spectre v2:        Mitigation; Enhanced IBRS, IBPB conditional, RSB filling, PBRSB-eIBRS Not affected
Vulnerability Srbds:             Vulnerable: No microcode
Vulnerability Tsx async abort:   Not affected
Flags:                           fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acp
                                 i mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc art arch_perfmon peb
                                 s bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc cpuid aperfmperf tsc_known_freq pni pclmulqdq
                                  dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 sdbg cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe
                                  popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave rdrand lahf_lm 3dnowprefetch cpuid_fault epb cat_l
                                 2 cdp_l2 ssbd ibrs ibpb stibp ibrs_enhanced tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid ept_a
                                 d fsgsbase tsc_adjust smep erms rdt_a rdseed smap clflushopt clwb intel_pt sha_ni xsave
                                 opt xsavec xgetbv1 xsaves split_lock_detect dtherm ida arat pln pts hwp hwp_notify hwp_
                                 act_window hwp_epp hwp_pkg_req umip waitpkg gfni rdpid movdiri movdir64b md_clear flush
                                 _l1d arch_capabilities

lspci⌗ 

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 4e14
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 4e55 (rev 01)
00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Device 4e03
00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Device 4e11
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Device 4ded (rev 01)
00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Device 4def (rev 01)
00:14.5 SD Host controller: Intel Corporation Device 4df8 (rev 01)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Device 4de0 (rev 01)
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Device 4dd3 (rev 01)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 4db8 (rev 01)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 4db9 (rev 01)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 4dbd (rev 01)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device 4d87 (rev 01)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device 4dc8 (rev 01)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Device 4da3 (rev 01)
00:1f.5 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Device 4da4 (rev 01)
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Controller I225-V (rev 03)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Controller I225-V (rev 03)
03:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller SM961/PM961/SM963

vainfo⌗ 

libva info: VA-API version 1.10.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/iHD_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_10
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.10 (libva 2.10.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Intel iHD driver for Intel(R) Gen Graphics - 21.1.1 ()
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileNone                   :	VAEntrypointVideoProc
      VAProfileNone                   :	VAEntrypointStats
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileJPEGBaseline           :	VAEntrypointEncPicture
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileVP8Version0_3          :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileHEVCMain10             :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain10             :	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileVP9Profile0            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile1            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile2            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile3            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain422_10         :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain444            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain444            :	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP
      VAProfileHEVCMain444_10         :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain444_10         :	VAEntrypointEncSliceLP