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Personally, I really like odroid H2/H3 units (0). Much cheaper then Nuc's, DDR4 SO-DIMMs up to 64G, very low power draw, and X86 based so no compatibility issue

Personally, I really like odroid H2/H3 units (0). Much cheaper then Nuc's, DDR4 SO-DIMMs up to 64G, very low power draw, and X86 based so no compatibility issues. No where near as powerful as desktops but more then enough for running basic home lab stuff. I used to use a half rack full of Xeon based Dell and HP blades - but the blade chassis are huge/heavy and the power usage was HUGE! 0) https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3 https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3

gorkish 3y ago
One additional NVMe slot and 10GBe nics would make the H3+ an object of absolute perfection. So close, and yet so far.
- mech422 3y ago
  Heh - maybe in the H4 ?? :-) Though you can prolly stick a 10GB nic in the PCIE slot ?? Edit: Oh shit...just checked, it does NOT have a PCIE slot..I was sure it did :-(
- culopatin 3y ago
  And the n100 cpu
  - gorkish 3y ago
    n100 is overhyped IMO; I would prefer vendors focus on the connectivity and application requirements first and let the choice of SoC follow. The most important factor for this type of application is really PCIe lanes. If someone (other than broadcom) could introduce a basic fanout switch with PCIE5.0 upstream and loads of PCIe 3.0 downstream ports that would hopefully open the floodgates.
tombert 3y ago
How much is "huge"? My HP Proliant idles around 175W, and even running Folding@Home it only peaks at around 300W. Considering that I used lots of incandescent light bulbs throughout my house, each about 60W, 175W doesn't really seem that bad to me. Granted, this is one server. If you have a bunch of them running at high load all at once then of course that can get pretty pricey power-wise.
- mech422 3y ago
  The Dell chassis has a 2500w powersupply for 6 blades. The HP chassis has a 3000w PS for 8 blades.. I actually ran 3-4 extra circuits to the computer room to run it all...
- CTDOCodebases 3y ago
  Not the person you are replying too but huge will largely depend how much you pay for electricity. Electricity is very expensive in Europe In Sydney, Australia running your server just at idle would cost just over AUD $50 a month assuming it is powered by the grid. For about AUD $400 you could replace it with a 7 or 8 series Intel i7 mini PCI and throw a 10Gbe NIC in it and that thing will cost you AUD $7 a month to run. It gets tricky though if you want ECC RAM. Most of the cheaper low power systems that are available will take UDIMMs and that becomes prohibitively expensive if you need a decent amount of RAM.
- Fnoord 3y ago
  > Considering that I used lots of incandescent light bulbs throughout my house, each about 60W, 175W doesn't really seem that bad to me. Well, your monthly power bill would be much higher than needed with either those light bulbs or a server like that. Those light bulbs can be cheap to replace with more efficient variants. This was already true approx 30 years ago, back in the 90s. I got solar power. Without that, I wouldn't be having a Xeon server right now. Don't get me wrong, to each their own! That is the fun thing with homelab. You can optimize for power, price, noise, size, heat, or a combination of these. Then you can decide to have a couple of machines dedicated or have one large VM. Then you pick the OSes. For example, right now I am settled for my homelab server. I got a cluster to play with, too. I got a 10 gbit switch (which I only put on if I need the speed, otherwise I use a second hand Brocade with 10 gbit SFP+ uplink). Loads of fun. But my router is just an Edgerouter-Lite. EdgeOS is dead, and it doesn't have failover nor does it run a VM. If I run it in bridge mode (which I do now) and I use Wireguard it doesn't saturate 1 gbit at all. So I am looking for an alternative which is a bit future proof. Ie. with SFP+ because I will get fiber instead of DSL eventually.
  - tombert 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

gorkish 3y ago

One additional NVMe slot and 10GBe nics would make the H3+ an object of absolute perfection. So close, and yet so far.

mech422 3y ago
Heh - maybe in the H4 ?? :-) Though you can prolly stick a 10GB nic in the PCIE slot ?? Edit: Oh shit...just checked, it does NOT have a PCIE slot..I was sure it did :-(
culopatin 3y ago
And the n100 cpu
- gorkish 3y ago
  n100 is overhyped IMO; I would prefer vendors focus on the connectivity and application requirements first and let the choice of SoC follow. The most important factor for this type of application is really PCIe lanes. If someone (other than broadcom) could introduce a basic fanout switch with PCIE5.0 upstream and loads of PCIe 3.0 downstream ports that would hopefully open the floodgates.

tombert 3y ago

How much is "huge"? My HP Proliant idles around 175W, and even running Folding@Home it only peaks at around 300W. Considering that I used lots of incandescent light bulbs throughout my house, each about 60W, 175W doesn't really seem that bad to me. Granted, this is one server. If you have a bunch of them running at high load all at once then of course that can get pretty pricey power-wise.

mech422 3y ago
The Dell chassis has a 2500w powersupply for 6 blades. The HP chassis has a 3000w PS for 8 blades.. I actually ran 3-4 extra circuits to the computer room to run it all...
CTDOCodebases 3y ago
Not the person you are replying too but huge will largely depend how much you pay for electricity. Electricity is very expensive in Europe In Sydney, Australia running your server just at idle would cost just over AUD $50 a month assuming it is powered by the grid. For about AUD $400 you could replace it with a 7 or 8 series Intel i7 mini PCI and throw a 10Gbe NIC in it and that thing will cost you AUD $7 a month to run. It gets tricky though if you want ECC RAM. Most of the cheaper low power systems that are available will take UDIMMs and that becomes prohibitively expensive if you need a decent amount of RAM.
Fnoord 3y ago
> Considering that I used lots of incandescent light bulbs throughout my house, each about 60W, 175W doesn't really seem that bad to me. Well, your monthly power bill would be much higher than needed with either those light bulbs or a server like that. Those light bulbs can be cheap to replace with more efficient variants. This was already true approx 30 years ago, back in the 90s. I got solar power. Without that, I wouldn't be having a Xeon server right now. Don't get me wrong, to each their own! That is the fun thing with homelab. You can optimize for power, price, noise, size, heat, or a combination of these. Then you can decide to have a couple of machines dedicated or have one large VM. Then you pick the OSes. For example, right now I am settled for my homelab server. I got a cluster to play with, too. I got a 10 gbit switch (which I only put on if I need the speed, otherwise I use a second hand Brocade with 10 gbit SFP+ uplink). Loads of fun. But my router is just an Edgerouter-Lite. EdgeOS is dead, and it doesn't have failover nor does it run a VM. If I run it in bridge mode (which I do now) and I use Wireguard it doesn't saturate 1 gbit at all. So I am looking for an alternative which is a bit future proof. Ie. with SFP+ because I will get fiber instead of DSL eventually.
- tombert 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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