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> Rack mount hardware is almost always expensive, loud, and power hungry. It really depends on the particular hardware. I recently picked up an R720 with 128GB
by aftbit 5y ago
> Rack mount hardware is almost always expensive, loud, and power hungry.
It really depends on the particular hardware. I recently picked up an R720 with 128GB of memory and dual E5-2670v1 for $450 on eBay. It idles at 120W (about the same as my brand new Ryzen 5950X desktop). It is not much louder than my old air-cooled 8700K consumer PC. Of course, it's not much faster either, and it's definitely slower than my Ryzen.
I bought it to learn how to use iDRAC and practice ZFS with 10x $20 1GB 10k RPM SAS drives. Also maybe to give Proxmox a try. All of my practical home-prod stuff runs on an old i5 desktop, not my rack servers.
- fomine3 5y ago120W at idle on desktop computer looks not good.
- KingMachiavelli 5y agoThe issue is that power savings stuff is often bad on Linux... especially on older hardware. 'Idle' in this context means running with near zero load since a server cannot suspend or hibernate. In theory you could setup hibernate/suspend + WoL but that tends to not work well. Some power saving features will really only save 5-10W and can make PCIe cards unstable, poor hard drive performance, laggy keyboard & mouse, etc. In particuler, GPUs often have poor suport for the normal power saving features. I just pulled the dedicated GPU (GTX 760) out of my old machine that is now a headless server and that saved ~20W. What's weird and bad is that that 20W was being consumed without a graphical interface even running.