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ThinkPad as a Server: The Follow-Up
- metadat 4y agoNo ECC.. hmm. Maybe my data at home isn't that important, definitely not $$$ mission critical. Curious what the power draw is with an older Thinkpad like this while idling and under load. Edit: thank you nequo.
- gymbeaux 4y agoIn my research, there’s a lot of conflicting info about ECC RAM, but it seems like it’s not able to guarantee data integrity over long periods of time, but for enterprise situations, the relatively small premium is worth having if it prevents even one bit flip. As for power draw, a Sandy Bridge laptop will probably draw around 25-30W idle and 50-60W under full load (excluding any GPU)
- justsomehnguy 4y agoAs someone who got f*d up with Root CA failing, because the writes* to HDD were sucessful, but reads were not...
- kiririn 4y agoFor home use you’re mainly buying ECC for it to ring alarm bells when a stick spontaneously fails, and to avoid the data loss nightmares and corruption spread to backups that follow
- gymbeaux 4y agoI'm pretty sure this is all 100% correct so why are the haters hating? Anyone who has googled around on ECC info knows that there are many arguments on forums about what ECC RAM does and how valuable it is and when. For example, colloquially, you NEED ECC RAM for ZFS disks, however even ECC RAM can only compensate for so much. Power draw figures are on-point.
- nequo 4y ago> Curious what the power draw is with an older Thinkpad like this while idling and under load. It is specifically detailed in the post: As a result of all of this, the T430 is very quiet while using about 10-12W of power while idling. Under the maximum CPU load generated by `stress`, the total system power usage is around 34W.
- mftrhu 4y ago> Curious what the power draw is with an older Thinkpad like this while idling and under load. I have an X230i running Debian, and I got it to idle - screen on, backlight low, no browser open, Emacs and Syncthing running - at around 8 W. It gets up to ~10 W with light usage - i.e., a few browser tabs open - ~13 W at 40% load, and ~17 W at 75% (I tested the last two with x265 video playback, which doesn't get hardware acceleration on Ivy Bridge). The i3-3120m in it should have a TDP of 35 W, but I don't think I ever saw it draw that much.
- davidy123 4y agoThis is such a good idea. You can get "old" Thinkpads with NVidia GPUs and 16+ GB RAM for a very decent price, and use them for home server purposes like encoding and object detection. Much smaller and lower power and heat than a desktop, yet much more powerful than a Pi, Jetson, &c. There are even workstation class models with Xeons and ECC RAM.
- app4soft 4y ago> "old" Thinkpads with NVidia GPU > with NVidia GPU *Linux*...
- linster 4y agoWhat about Linux? Are you saying running an nvidia driver is an extra setup step? Or something else entirely?
- gymbeaux 4y agoIt’s gotten a lot easier to run NVidia GPUs on Linux since Linus first gave Nvidia the finger all those years ago. It’s usually a matter of running a single package manager command.
- TylerE 4y agoI’m old enough to remember when it was the NVidia drivers that were great (because it shared most of its code with the windows driver so supported “nice things”), and the ATI driver (fglrx) was a total dumpster fire that never worked right.
- gymbeaux 4y agoCorrect me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Nvidia Linux drivers were ever bad, they just weren’t open-source and Linus Torvalds didn’t like that the open-source nouveau drivers sucked.
- davidy123 4y ago
- pengaru 4y agoBest part about using an old laptop for a home server is the built-in UPS.
- app4soft 4y agoOld laptops has its built-in UPS degraded in most cases.
- pengaru 4y agoI've never had a UPS not need battery service at some point, and they tend to use lead-acid which is especially fragile when it comes to deep discharges vs. LiIon laptop batteries. I think in any case the battery is a wear item that will need servicing. Just make sure you pick a common laptop with plentiful third-party battery replacement options. Preferably ones that can have the battery swapped while online (not a LiPo pouch buried inside a macbook)
- sentientslug 4y agoNot sure of many modern business class laptops that have hot swappable batteries anymore
- pengaru 4y agoThe whole point of this is to put a disused laptop into server duty.
- gymbeaux 4y agoBut laptop batteries typically last several hours, which most UPSes are meant to last a matter of minutes, so even a 5-year-old laptop battery will likely meet or exceed UPS performance.
- totetsu 4y agoOne that will conveniently double as a pillow as the battery slowly balloons.
- LASR 4y agoThis is a very useful way to retire old laptops. I have a dell business laptop that is rocking an Ivy-bridge quad core. It’s over 10 years now and it’s still running a few low power VMs - pihole and home assistant. But more recently I’ve been moving my workloads to the 2012 Mac Mini i7s quads. Marketplace has them for <$100 if you look carefully. Bought three of those for just $50 + $30 SSD upgrade. Highly recommended vs the RPi.
- Spooky23 4y agoThe other awesome way to do this is old thin clients. You can get a HP t620 or t630 (or the Wyse equivalent) for <$75. They usually have AMD SoCs and can take M2 SSDs.
- indigodaddy 4y agoAssuming the Dell and HP thin clients could be booted from a USB flash drive somehow as well?
- Spooky23 4y agoAbsolutely! They are just little PCs. I have a little Dell 3040 that only has 8GB of storage that’s a pita to upgrade and do this. I use a Samsung external flash drive to store surveillance video in a friends barn.
- numpad0 4y agoModel dependent, but a lot of “thin” clients are just x64 PCs with Atom or AMD GX CPUs, with M.2 disks, BIOS menus and all. Zero clients are usually more exotic in unique ways.
- shoo 4y ago> old thin clients yes! i ran a small personal app (postgres, background processes, tiny web app) on a wyse thin client for years. low power consumption, dead quiet. there's a great site here re: repurposing cheap old thin clients https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/ https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/
- gravypod 4y agoI've been doing this with an x220. You can also get light ipmi functionality from the Intel vpro me. I can VNC into the laptop and control it out of band. Even going into the bios. This is a must for something you're putting into an annoying to get to place.
- anderspitman 4y agoPerhaps the greatest laptop ever made.
- culopatin 4y agoSame here. I don’t do anything intensive but I use it as my server too. I’ll look into the functionality you mention.
- minimaul 4y agoI'm not surprised there were unexpected issues - I've found running laptops 24x7 (or other SFF devices) tends to get weird heat issues. I had fun with 8th gen Intel NUCs just turning themselves off after a while, turned out to be issues cooling the VRMs. Also had thunderbolt devices just drop after extended uptimes. Similar issues with Asrock Deskminis - although I could mitigate it here by changing the CPU cooler to force more air over the VRM heatsink.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoThere are cases for use without GPUs with standard desktop components, like In-Win Chopin.They are like 3/4 liters, so still really small. Comes with a tiny inbuilt 150W poeer supply. Fitted it with i3-8300 cpu and it runs for years. You can get even thinner cases if you use slim motherboards with DC barrel jack input
- bluedino 4y agoI used to have identical ThinkPad T41's. When I went to a coffee shop, I'd leave one in my backpack running a web server etc, and then develop on the other one. Running on Linode or something could have been faster, but most of the time the coffee shop internet connection was dog slow.
- fragmede 4y agoHow did you save the one in your backpack from overheating?
- supriyo-biswas 4y agoA SSH connection shouldn’t consume too much bandwidth, so why not use a server? Buying a second laptop to save on $60/year seems a bit too much.
- amatecha 4y agoCurrently got an old ThinkPad X230T running my Valheim server. Been up for over a year straight! That's pretty much straight from the person I bought it from -- wiped the noisy old HDD, installed Debian (IIRC) and set up my server. Been running ever since, and easily supports 4+ simultaneous players. Pretty sweet! Yeah, it clicks suspiciously every so often (so I'm sure the HDD won't last), but I automatically back up the game world so the chance of any data loss is slim. Oh yeah, I have wifi off on mine, and the display shut off via command line, to reduce power usage a bit. I wouldn't go so far as to start disassembling the system haha
- mowienay 4y agoI like the approach. How many watts is that setup consuming idle and under load
- dchuk 4y agoI’m halfway done turning a 2010 MacBook Air with a broken screen into a headless batocera game machine for my living room (halfway because I had to order some more tools because I’m missing a torx driver). It’s actually going to create my ideal computer, I love the keyboard and trackpad of the MacBooks and you just plug in an external display and it works. One helpful thing that isn’t easy to google: if you need to get to Mac recovery console but your MacBook’s screen is cracked, take it apart and disconnect the LVDS (lcd screen) cable, and it basically turns your MacBook into a Mac mini. Otherwise it will boot to its own screen first until the OS is up and ready.
- plugin-baby 4y ago> take it apart and disconnect the LVDS (lcd screen) cable Can you then completely remove the screen?
- dchuk 4y agoYep, just finished doing that actually. A little hacky to get the wifi antenna to sit cleanly on the bottom part of the case, but otherwise worked out perfectly!
- truncate 4y agoJust wondering what's the idle power usage (watt hrs) is like?
- dchuk 4y agoI don’t really know, haven’t measured. Likely less than a normal MacBook Air since the display is gone. Regardless, I live in San Diego and our electricity is already so overpriced that it just doesn’t even register for me anymore anyways.
- msravi 4y agoI use a mid-2010 macbook pro (with the screen developing large splotches of black) as a home server after installing linux mint, and it's been working flawlessly. Been up now for 192 days without a reboot. It runs a webserver for two low-volume websites, pihole, nextcloud, photoprism, paperless-ngx. The disconnecting lvds cable is a helpful tip, thank you!
- waqas_x 4y agoJust checked, my old dell i3 xps laptop running as a home server with no hardware changes and just its lid closed has the current uptime of 149 days without any reboot. This laptop wouldve sold for next to nothing, and already, it has served me approx $100 of cloud costs.
- speedgoose 4y agoYou have to take into account electricity costs, but it’s probably still going to be much cheaper than cloud.
- beckingz 4y agoI ran Factorio on a ASUS laptop that I had removed the screen from (to build an external monitor). Headless Factorio on a headless laptop server. (screenless?)
- Scoundreller 4y agoMy main advice for anyone doing something like this is to ensure that the "hot" side of the heat pipe is below the "cold" side where the cooling fan is. Putting it upside down means the heat pipe has to work against gravity and that's bad. Even along the same plane isn't great, then it has the wick back the condensed cooling fluid, which is less efficient than simple gravity transfer back down.
- alfons_foobar 4y agoHuh, I always thought the heat pipes are just plain copper (or similar heat-conducting material), never crossed my mind that there could be a cooling fluid inside. TIL!
- rtkwe 4y agoThey generally have a wicking material in there to handle the pipe being in a poor orientation. They would be MUCH less effective trying to just conduct heat to the cooling fins.
- throwaway4759 4y agoBroken screen laptops are great for server. I bought a 11th gen Intel quad core laptop 1135g7 for $80 last month off ebay and was super happy.
- tomcam 4y agoOP’s notion of stripping as much as possible triggered a related question. If I understand correctly many cloud data centers are essentially huge collections of caseless motherboards with disks hanging off them. Near big bodies of water for cooling. Wouldn’t the exposed circuitry corrode or get dusty?
- icelancer 4y agoWe use Thinkpads for Zoom Rooms and other TV-type displays. Regularly hit 100+ days of uptime with no issues. Such great machines.
- Havoc 4y agoIf the thermal paste is dripping out then there likely isn't enough pressure from the bracket (plus I'd take a closer look at the paste brand)
- Saris 4y agoRegarding the thermal paste pump-out, it's due to using thin paste that's not designed for direct die-to-heatsink contact (Arctic MX-5, etc). The constant thermal expansion/contraction 'pumps' the paste out the sides, because the die expands differently than the copper heatsink. You can get a thick paste made for that purpose, like SYY 157 which is what I use, and it will stay in place. I just re-pasted my GPU and had the same issue occur, with standard CPU paste within a week the temperature was very high, after using a thicker paste it's been fine and has much lower temps.
- ry8806 4y agoIt's great to see others doing this and writing about it. I too browse /r/homelab and look at some of the power-hungry monsters people are running. Given energy price rises in my country (UK), it makes them too expensive to run. I've managed to get my setup [0], consuming ~8w (idle + running my blog). Going from an old laptop with a broken screen, putting it to use instead of making it e-waste, does feel good [0] https://ryansouthgate.com/my-old-laptop-is-my-new-web-server/ https://ryansouthgate.com/my-old-laptop-is-my-new-web-server...