Homelab

You can build a working 10-gigabit home network for around $200 by combining a budget 5-port 10GbE switch with Cat6a cabling and affordable PCIe NICs. The result saturates NVMe-backed NAS transfers at roughly 1,100 MB/s - about ten times faster than gigabit Ethernet - without enterprise-grade hardware or specialized wiring. Most of the savings come from buying NICs secondhand and sticking with unmanaged switches.

When Gigabit Becomes the Bottleneck

Gigabit Ethernet tops out at around 112 MB/s of real throughput. A basic NVMe SSD reads at 3,500 MB/s or more. That means your network is roughly 30 times slower than your storage - and for anyone running a NAS, this gap shows up fast.

That retired ThinkPad or Dell Latitude in your drawer beats a Raspberry Pi 5 on raw CPU, draws about the same idle power, and ships with a free UPS: its own battery. Install Ubuntu Server or Debian , enable SSH, and close the lid. You now have a silent homelab node that runs Docker, file shares, or home automation at zero hardware cost.

This guide covers every step: picking the right laptop, prepping the hardware, and installing a headless Linux distro. It also walks through hardening it for always-on use , running services with Docker Compose, and keeping the box stable for years.

Radon is a colorless, odorless radioactive gas that seeps from soil and rock. It is the second-leading cause of lung cancer after smoking. The only way to know your exposure is to measure it over months, not minutes. Indoor levels swing by ten times between calm winter nights and breezy summer afternoons. The cleanest build I have found in 2026 pairs the FTLab RD200M sensor with an ESP32 running ESPHome . The RD200M is a pulsed ion chamber with a simple UART output. The node sends live and rolling-average readings to Home Assistant . It also fires alerts when your annual average creeps toward the EPA action level of 4 pCi/L (148 Bq/m3) . Total parts cost is about 150 USD, roughly half the price of an Airthings View Plus, and you own every byte of the data.

The WD Black SN8100 (Gen5, TLC, up to 14,900 MB/s) is the best overall NVMe SSD for homelabs in 2026, while the WD Black SN7100 (Gen4, TLC) offers the best value for most builds. Avoid QLC drives for write-heavy NAS workloads - TLC endurance is worth the small price premium when your data matters.

Picking an SSD for a homelab is different from picking one for a gaming PC. Your homelab drives run 24/7, handle sustained write workloads from VMs and containers, and need to last years without surprise failures. The wrong choice - a cheap QLC drive in a write-heavy Proxmox setup, for instance - can burn through its endurance rating in under a year. This guide covers which drives are worth buying right now, what to skip, and how to keep them healthy once they’re installed.

AMD’s Strix Halo - officially the Ryzen AI Max 300 series - is the first x86 APU that can genuinely replace a discrete GPU for local AI workloads. The flagship Ryzen AI Max+ 395 pairs 16 Zen 5 cores with a 40 CU Radeon 8060S iGPU, a 50 TOPS XDNA 2 NPU, and up to 128GB of LPDDR5X-8000 unified memory on a 256-bit bus. For homelabbers who want one node to run Proxmox, a Llama 3.3 70B inference endpoint, and a handful of VMs without a discrete GPU, Strix Halo delivers what no other single-socket mini PC can. The catch is price - $1,600 to $2,800 depending on configuration - and the fact that RAM is soldered at the factory.

Pick Komodo for Git-driven deploys across many Docker servers from one screen. Choose Portainer if you run Kubernetes, which Komodo does not support. Pick Dockge for a single lightweight host. Komodo added a dedicated Docker Swarm resource in 2026, closing what used to be the single most-cited reason people held off, a complaint that once drew 168 votes on Reddit.

What is Komodo and what problem does it solve?

Komodo is an open-source tool that builds and deploys Docker software across many servers from one place. It is licensed under GPL-3.0 and written in Rust and TypeScript. The project lives at moghtech/komodo and was renamed from “Monitor” before the rebrand.