Out with the old, in with the new(er).
| HP z440 workstation | $55.99 + $40 shipping | ebay |
| 32gb ecc ddr4 | $36.50 | ebay |
| HBA card with cables | $32 | ebay |
| 2x 240gb Intel SSD | $22.22 | ebay |
| 5x 128GB NVME SSD | $29.99 | ebay |
| HP z4 g2 workstation | $105 | ebay |
| 2x 18TB HDD | $359.98 | serverpartdeals |
| 4U Rosewill chassis | $75 | FB marketplace |
| 2x Noctua 120mm fans | $30 | Amazon |
Specs for the new hardware
HP Z440
HP Z440 came with 1x 3.20GHz Xeon E5-1660 v4 | 16GB DDR4 | No HDD | DVD-RW | GT 730. I replaced the ram with the 32GB ECC memory and removed the GPU. The machine is now running Truenas Scale. In order to save some watts, I turned off the hyprethreading. It still has more than enough power for truenas and the few apps im running. I have since transplanted the machine into a Rosewill 4U chassis that holds up at 15 drives.
The drive situation is a little wild in this machine. I have the 2 new 18TB drives in a mirror pool for media, 3x 14TB drives in a raidz1 pool (pulled these from my old Synology).The boot drive is one of the 240gb intel SSDs. The 2nd intel SSD is in a single drive pool for app storage. Finally, there’s an old 1TB SSD in another single drive pool (GASP) used for PhotoSphere config storage.
HP Z4 G2
The Z4 G2 came with Core i3-8100 3.6Ghz, 32GB DDR4 RAM and 1TB HDD. I installed proxmox on this host and use it as my router/firewall with Opnsense and Plex (the CPU has quicksync graphics which can transcode multiple 4k streams while idling at 14 watts). I removed some of the RAM and am currently running it with only 16GB which seems to be enough.
The G2 is running Proxmox on one of the NVMEs that I bought. For plex storage I installed an old 500GB SSD. Despite this machine having 2 SATA NVME ports I can’t seem to get them both running at the same time. That’s why I installed the old SATA SSD for plex.
All in all I am pretty happy with the upgrade. I moved everything up to a new generation (nothing I had before ran DDR4). I think the price on the systems was great. The most expensive component was the new drives but I needed them in order to migrate my data from the old synology. With the homelab upgrade I also gained a remote, off-site backup. I left 2 8TB drives in the synology and moved it to my parents house. Now I can backup important documents and photos to it through tailscale.
