I just recently decided to upgrade my homelab once again. Especially my trusy little “Service”-Machine. You remember? The one I wrote about in my Hosted in the woods entry. It will be basically the same system but I want to upgrade the hardware. Currently it is running on a small i3-6100T machine with about 16gigs of RAM and a SSHD Harddrive. Why is it so low spec’d you might ask. Good question! First of all: for what I am doing with this machine I dont really need much computing power or massive amounts of RAM.

BUT!

I have come to the point where I just need a tad more performance. So far I was the only one using this machines capabilities. Which means: Now there is someone else, right? Yes… and no. Let me explain: The reason I need some more ressources on this machine is simple: more is always better. Just kidding!

I ran out of storage on the system itself (the NAS still has plenty room, but its used for other things) and I wanted to upgrade the systems SSHD to a proper SSD anyway at some point and as I have it offline and open, I might as well just upgrade everything else.

I will upgrade the main components of the systems going from i3-6100T to a i7-6600T (i am stuck at 6th gen with the current board and dont want/need to change this now) 16GB to 32GB DDR4 RAM and 500GB SSHD to a 2TB SSD I think this will give me enough ressources to manage my services without bottlenecks and also allow multiple users on the system. Because in the future I would like to use this machine as some sort of proxy/gateway to other machines. It will cache the most recently requested data locally and be my single point of failure entry to my homelab. I will write about my (hopefully boring) adventure of cloning my current system to the new harddrive but first I have to do it. All parts are in the mail and I am waiting to receive everything in a few days.

Lets hope this will work fingers crossed

UPDATE: I received all parts for my homelab upgrade. And if you can read this it means that everything is at least running again. I wasnt able to update all the components like I wanted to but the CPU and Harddrive are working. For some reason the machine refuses to boot with the new RAM. I checked the manual and the vendor page for compatibility but couldnt find anyth9ing that would speak against this amount of RAM. I have one more idea as to why its not working and that might be the BIOS version. I never updated the BIOS on that machine and maybe a newer version extends the comaptibility of possible RAM sticks. The issue is that this is a headless system. Meaning I dont have a screen or peripherals attached to it. There is just the ethernet connection, a usb connection to a NAS and the power line. But I recently heard something about a jetkvm oder nanokvm or something which is apparently a low cost kvm solution that provides I/O over ethernet. I will have to take a closer look at possible solutions because from what I saw the current solutions are using HDMI for screen output and my machine only has DP.