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Ask HN: Low power home server hardware?
Im looking to consolidate some of my old pi's into a low power home server, something powerful enough to run KVM/QEMU/dockerless pods. it should be quiet as well maybe? does anyone have a recommendation for the HW spec? or maybe a product?
- aDfbrtVt 4y agoI would recommend any of the well reviewed units from the "Tiny Mini Micro" series from Serve the Home. https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic... I personally use a Lenovo Tiny M920q purchased used from eBay as a Proxmox node.
- vhodges 4y agoI bought one of these https://buy.hpe.com/us/en/servers/tower-servers/hpe-proliant-microserver-gen10-plus/p/1012241014 https://buy.hpe.com/us/en/servers/tower-servers/hpe-proliant... (on sale from Newegg) w/180w external brick, 4core xeon, 16 Gigs of RAM, 1xSSD (Boot) and 3xHDD (SnapRaid) as a NAS/OwnCloud box (and probably more in the future), threw NixOs on it (my first experience with NixOS) and am reasonably happy with the result. It's compact and quite quiet. One word of warning. It doesn't like to finish posting every time. I suspect the PS might not like all the startup current that all 3 HDD spinning up at the same time brings. There are some entry level Dells I was looking at as well (that also frequently go on sale) but this one won out.
- perrylaj 4y agoI actually went a very similar route, but with a Thinkserver device. It's been some number of years, but it looks like they still have something similar on offer: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/servers-storage/servers/towers/thinksystem-st50-v2/len21ts0004 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/servers-storage/servers/tower... These aren't low power in the same way an ARM-based edge-of-network device might be, but it's been great for what I need: some minimal local services, lots of storage, and fair cpu performance for things like transcoding media.
- aborsy 4y agoI am curious if HPE is good for a TrueNAS server? And how does it compare with ixsystem mini ZFS NAS boxes? For a storage NAS, it sounds more powerful than needed. For running hypervisor, VMs and applications, it seems less powerful than needed.
- vhodges 4y agoHey... sorry I need a better way to track these discussions. So... I looked at the TruNAS mini before and just configured the base model: TruNAS Celeron & 8GB RAM (with 1x1TB SSD and 3x2TB HD) vs. HPE Xeon & 16GB RAM (with 1x500GB SSD and 3x1TB HD). So accounting for the smaller drives the TruNAS comes in around 1300USD (>1600CAD) vs the 1120 CAD I spent on the HPE (but I got it on sale). Note the HPE drive bays are NOT hotswap though they are quick change. As for VMs, it entirely depends on the workloads you need to run of course. It's lots for mine :) but I can see getting a second one at some point if I needed to.
- aborsy 4y agoThanks much for the reply!
- gandalfff 4y agoI'm curious about why it needs to be low power. The electricity needed for most computers doesn't cost very much, at least not in the US. You could get away with using an old laptop instead of a Pi and difference in cost of power consumption is negligible. You could also check out Mac Minis and SFF PCs as your budget allows. I have a 2009 Mac Mini server with two drive bays. It's not the most powerful thing but it can be yours if you want it.
- j0057 4y agohttps://fit-iot.com/web/products/fitlet3/fitlet3-specifications/ https://fit-iot.com/web/products/fitlet3/fitlet3-specificati...
- cweagans 4y agoAccording to https://www.martinrowan.co.uk/2019/07/raspberry-pi-4-power-temperature-at-idle/ https://www.martinrowan.co.uk/2019/07/raspberry-pi-4-power-t... and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201897 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201897, an M1 Mac Mini idles at roughly 2x the idle power consumption of a rPi 4 with the default firmware. My next purchase for my rack is definitely going to be an M1 Mac Mini with the RAM upgrade. This way, I can use it as a build server for Mac, Windows, and Linux (the latter two through VMs) + whatever else I want to run. It's somewhat expensive, but it does literally everything I'd ever need out of a home server.
- barnabee 4y agoI bought an i7 Lenovo Thinkcentre off eBay and swapped the spinning disk out for an SSD. It’s been great and is pretty much silent. The integrated graphics is even good enough for Plex transcoding.
- benlivengood 4y agoI just switched to an 8GB raspberry Pi 4 for a ZFS storage solution, so maybe that is an option if you only need a couple VMs? Are you doing transcoding or other CPU-heavy tasks? If not, Atom chipsets in laptops will be the lowest power consumption that has significantly more RAM than the Pi 4. If you have CPU-heavy load then Ryzen Zen3 generation are the current winners at performance/Watt.
- bcrl 4y agoI've had good success with the ASRock X470D4U and X570D4U server boards that accept AMD Ryzen CPUs and have ECC support. Just make sure to use the dedicated IPMI ethernet port rather than the shared ethernet port. The shared ethernet port has the nasty downside of losing connectivity during reboot while the dedicated port does not. Note that if you choose the xx00G series of CPUs with integrated GPUs, only support ECC in the Pro models. The xxx0G CPUs have quite good performance in much lower power budgets, hence why they're worth mentioning I've built more than 5 servers with these boards to good success.
- Aromasin 4y agoI've been using an Intel NUC 11 for the past year and it's treated me very well. Small form factor, and relatively low power usage although I've forgotten exactly how much.
- nbernard 4y agoTake a look at Supermicro motherboards. They should have server class Atom-based motherboards, hence low power but with network management, possibility to use ECC RAM, hardware support for virtualization, etc.
- p0d 4y agoI put an ssd in a hp business desktop, i5-6th gen, and it costs $3-4 a month to run 24/7.