Hello all!

I am currently planning out my first homelab and I have been having an immense amount of trouble finding the right configuration for my first home server. I have been bouncing back and forth between platforms and I just feel nervous about making the wrong choices.

My needs really aren’t so crazy, the main purpose of this server will be NAS, and so I will likely put a good bit of the budget into storage. Though, I would also love to run some docker containers here and there for things like Jellyfin, Pi-hole, and Home Assistant. I also would be running some other random Linux VMs, but nothing too critical.

The only three things I really care about otherwise are decent hardware transcoding, power efficiency, and support for ECC memory.

I am considering picking up an older Kaby Lake i3 7100 or maybe a newer i3 10100 and going from there, as the base system would be rather inexpensive this way. But part of me also wonders if I should step up to something with 6 cores. Or maybe there is another option all together that is better?