3 ms·

To scale, I prefer tablets with a wwan port and a shattered screen: on ebay, for less than $100 each, I can fit 2x m2 NVMe (one 2242 in the wwan port), they are

by 1996 6y ago

To scale, I prefer tablets with a wwan port and a shattered screen: on ebay, for less than $100 each, I can fit 2x m2 NVMe (one 2242 in the wwan port), they are small, and each come with their own UPS (battery) and standardized power connector (USB-c) while supporting KVM (AMT if you know which models to buy)

lostlogin 6y ago
Nice. What are you running on them? ESXi runs nicely on a Nuc, and it’ll do a load of VMs with plenty of resources (the Nucs will take 64gb). But the price for that is probably 5-10x what you are describing.
- 1996 6y ago
  > the price for that is probably 5-10x what you are describing. Indeed the reason why I do what I do! I can have 10x of them for the cost of 1 of your Nucs. For example, my latest purchase was $15 per tablet with 8Gb of RAM, delivered. Add 2x brand new M2 2230 drives which cost about $20 apiece, and each node costs about $55. > What are you running on them? Sharded databases and Ceph clusters mostly. Each shard uses very little power (and does not run hot) but has 2x nvme in mirror. With raid10 f2 on linux or zfs mirror on bsd you gain in read speed on top of the raid1 safety. Sometimes I add USB external storage: tablets often have 2 USBC ports, so $100 gives an extra 8Tb for warm storage. For HDD, USBC is not a restricting factor anymore. Now I am trying VMs: with a dedicated NVMe, IO performance is good, but there is not enough RAM yet. When 16Gb becomes the new normal, that will be much easier.
  - girvo 6y ago
    My home server for years was various laptops with busted screens :) ran quiet, low power usage, but with more than enough compute for my usage! I’ve lately moved to a second hand Dell SFF office PC, as it gave me more expansion and even faster compute. Sits next to the router in the lounge, the girlfriend forgets it’s even there!

3 ms·

To scale, I prefer tablets with a wwan port and a shattered screen: on ebay, for less than $100 each, I can fit 2x m2 NVMe (one 2242 in the wwan port), they are

by 1996 6y ago

lostlogin 6y ago
Nice. What are you running on them? ESXi runs nicely on a Nuc, and it’ll do a load of VMs with plenty of resources (the Nucs will take 64gb). But the price for that is probably 5-10x what you are describing.
- 1996 6y ago
  > the price for that is probably 5-10x what you are describing. Indeed the reason why I do what I do! I can have 10x of them for the cost of 1 of your Nucs. For example, my latest purchase was $15 per tablet with 8Gb of RAM, delivered. Add 2x brand new M2 2230 drives which cost about $20 apiece, and each node costs about $55. > What are you running on them? Sharded databases and Ceph clusters mostly. Each shard uses very little power (and does not run hot) but has 2x nvme in mirror. With raid10 f2 on linux or zfs mirror on bsd you gain in read speed on top of the raid1 safety. Sometimes I add USB external storage: tablets often have 2 USBC ports, so $100 gives an extra 8Tb for warm storage. For HDD, USBC is not a restricting factor anymore. Now I am trying VMs: with a dedicated NVMe, IO performance is good, but there is not enough RAM yet. When 16Gb becomes the new normal, that will be much easier.
  - girvo 6y ago
    My home server for years was various laptops with busted screens :) ran quiet, low power usage, but with more than enough compute for my usage! I’ve lately moved to a second hand Dell SFF office PC, as it gave me more expansion and even faster compute. Sits next to the router in the lounge, the girlfriend forgets it’s even there!