cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24850430
EDIT: i had an rpi it died from esd i think
EDIT2: this is also my work machine and i sleep to the sound of the fans
the best home server is a computer you’re not using, the second best home server is a bajillion dollar server rack you looted from behind a meta LLM farm
You have it backwards. We self host to justify the hardware setup.
Best starter for self hosting:
Although laptops technically have a built in battery backup 😎
I’d say not just starter… My rack is full of tiny/mini/micros. Proxmox on all, data on the three NAS boxes, easy to replace a box if needed (for example, the optiplex 7040 that the board died on).
Way quieter than a regular rack, lower power use, etc. If all goes well following an intended move, I should be able to safely power it off solar + batt only. Grand total wattage for all these boxes is less than my desktop (when I last checked at least, I was running about 300-350W. I did swap two that have dgpu’s now, so maybe a touch higher).
My homelab is three Lenovo M920q systems complete with 9th gen i7 procs, 24GB ram, and 10Gbps fibre/Ceph storage. Those mini PCs can be beasts.
There are some 13th gen i9s at work that are usff (like a fat version of the tiny, they are p3 ultras) I can’t wait to get my hands on at home. dGPU, 2.5gbit + 1gbit on board, 64gb ram on these as purchased, etc, etc. Total monster in under 4l.
I actually ended up with a cluster of those over a standard server for a client, way more power and lower price, and with HA to boot. Should have a few all to myself next year and I can’t wait to be ridiculous with them.
I recently got a M710q with an i3 7100T. It uses around 3W on idle. I threw 8GB of RAM and a 512GB ramless NVMe for a total of under 100€. Absolutely would recommend (if you don’t need too much storage). Also Dell has some machines.
For more info, servethehome (they have a YouTube channel and a blog) has a whole series on “tiny mini micro” machines.
What’s a ramless NVMe? Specifically the ramless part, I know an NVMe is an SSD.
Some fancy SSDs have additional DRAM cache:
The presence of a DRAM chip means that the CPU does not need to access the slower NAND chips for mapping tables while fetching data. DRAM being faster provides the location of stored data quickly for viewing or modification.
I went overboard but only because I was having fun with it and didn’t like the octopus of hard drives plugged into my NUC
If wanting to have cool oscilloscopes and blinkenlights is wrong then I don’t want to be right.
