4 ms·

$30 a month should not be a hardship for most; I think I spend more for fast food every week (I certainly spend way more than that for random ebay and amazon pu

by cr0sh 7y ago

$30 a month should not be a hardship for most; I think I spend more for fast food every week (I certainly spend way more than that for random ebay and amazon purchases each month - and let's not get into what I spend on my Jeep). I can understand it being a concern if you are trying to run multiple machines like this (beowulf cluster?) - or if you just don't want to be wasting the power by leaving the machines running an idle... ...but really, at idle without anything happening, I doubt a system even pulls half that. The best way to find out would be to plug the machine into some kind of "kill-o-watt" monitor and check what it uses at idle vs under load. I would guess that a relatively modern machine, with a basic-level CPU, running headless and using SSDs or laptop hard drives - or just one or two standard desktop drives - likely wouldn't pull more than 150 watts (or could be made to do so).

ozim 7y ago
If you can get VPS for $5 a month, I kind of don't feel like running some old hardware at home is worth $30. Ofc depends on what you use it for. For NAS I would rather buy actual NAS which would have Plex and other stuff and would take a lot less in power than old computer and would be a lot better in terms of storing data.
- ihattendorf 7y ago
  I've got a 5 year old server with 2x8 core sandy bridge xeons, 32GB ram (I had 128GB total but went down to 32GB since it wasn't being used), an SSD for the OS, and 8 hard drives from 2-8TB each (~30TB total). I idle at 100W +/- 10W, which is ~$10/month. Sure, I could get a VPS for $5/month (with much lower specs), but the massive amount of local storage plus the ability to easily host multiple VMs really outweighs the extra $5/month cost to have everything local. I run a handful of VMs and docker containers, such as pfSense, emby (similar to plex), HAProxy, samba shares, snapraid+mergerfs for storage, etc. Worth it to me, might not be for others unless they're interested in server administration. When this dies I'll probably downgrade to something smaller and shoot for <50 watts, but it's not worth it until it actually fails.

by cr0sh 7y ago

ozim 7y ago

If you can get VPS for $5 a month, I kind of don't feel like running some old hardware at home is worth $30. Ofc depends on what you use it for. For NAS I would rather buy actual NAS which would have Plex and other stuff and would take a lot less in power than old computer and would be a lot better in terms of storing data.

ihattendorf 7y ago
I've got a 5 year old server with 2x8 core sandy bridge xeons, 32GB ram (I had 128GB total but went down to 32GB since it wasn't being used), an SSD for the OS, and 8 hard drives from 2-8TB each (~30TB total). I idle at 100W +/- 10W, which is ~$10/month. Sure, I could get a VPS for $5/month (with much lower specs), but the massive amount of local storage plus the ability to easily host multiple VMs really outweighs the extra $5/month cost to have everything local. I run a handful of VMs and docker containers, such as pfSense, emby (similar to plex), HAProxy, samba shares, snapraid+mergerfs for storage, etc. Worth it to me, might not be for others unless they're interested in server administration. When this dies I'll probably downgrade to something smaller and shoot for <50 watts, but it's not worth it until it actually fails.