As my new pre-ordered FL13 is coming soon, I am thinking about how to repurpose my old 11th-gen motherboard.
I would like to build a small home server using a Framework 11th-gen i7 motherboard. One of the main things I’d like to run is Immich, since I’ve already reached the Google Cloud storage limit and I also care about privacy.
Here is the hardware I currently have:
Framework 11th-gen i7 motherboard
64GB RAM
4TB NVMe SSD
My initial plan is:
Install Proxmox on the internal NVMe drive
Run an Ubuntu Server VM for Docker containers
Run a few additional VMs
Since I work remotely as a software developer, I would also like to replicate my primary laptop environment there. That way, if something happens to my main laptop, I could continue working from the server VM temporarily.
The part I’m unsure about is storage expansion and redundancy for Immich and backups. I’d like the storage to survive a drive failure, and I would prefer to use SSDs only.
I was considering:
A multi-bay DAS enclosure
Converting the Wi-Fi slot to additional SATA ports
However, I’m not sure about the best approach, especially regarding power delivery and long-term reliability for additional drives.
Is anyone here running a similar setup with a Framework motherboard? I’d appreciate any advice or recommendations for storage configuration, DAS options, or other approaches I may not be aware of.
Yes, an 11th gen mainboard has been my primary homelab, router, firewall, file server, and docker container host for years now.
I went for a low cost 2 bay “toaster” style 3.5" hdd system. Two identical disks in btrfs RAID1, plus nightly automatic offsite cloning via btrbk. Btrfs has been very very reliable in this use case.
The 11th gen boards do seem to have some funky USB quirks. No idea about repurposing either m.2 interface to be a SATA interface instead. I considered it but just did not go anywhere with it .
Pretty much everything is directly attached. Keyboard and GPS module (for NTP serber) are behind a built in hub in a 7-in-1 hub though.
USB accessories just fail show up on randon bootups. intermittent “usb port xx-yy is unavailable, maybe the cable is bad?” messages in terminal. High speed (5Gbps or higher) randomly end up failed down 480M speeds according to lsusb -tv . These nuisance messages and bus assignments do not at all follow what is plugged into what port. Tested gobs of combinations by there’s no pattern, it is completely random. For grins I tested everything with my daily driver 13th mainboard also to rule out misbehaving devices, but no nuisance messages and everything is at the proper device speed on the 13th gen…
Maybe I just have a quirky board and you will have better luck. Fortunately I’m not going for absolute fastest storage and networking performance, or I will have had to trade out this board a long time ago.
I have been using an 11th Gen Mainboard as a home server as well. It has been running all of my self-hosted services in VMs as well. Has worked really well, and is going on 4 and years at this point.
Excuse the dust, but it evidences the length of time it has been running (Hahahahahaha):
Thank you both for sharing your setups and long-term experience with the board.
The USB behavior is definitely a bit concerning, especially intermittent device detection issues. Hopefully it is more of a nuisance than a real stability problem for storage workloads.
I think I will still give it a try with a USB dock/DAS setup, probably a 4–5 bay SSD enclosure over USB. My main goal is to run Immich together with a few VMs and Docker containers, so I’m hoping it will play nicely enough for that use case.
It’s reassuring to hear that both of you have been running these boards for years in homelab/server roles overall. Thanks again for all the details and for sharing the hardware references as well.
