6 ms·

My secret protip: old Fujitsu desktop/nuc PCs. At least in Germany (Europe?) they are cheap on ebay since a lot of businesses use them and upgrade on a regular

My secret protip: old Fujitsu desktop/nuc PCs. At least in Germany (Europe?) they are cheap on ebay since a lot of businesses use them and upgrade on a regular schedule. If you care about power consumption like I do, you can Google "$model energy consumption white paper" which contains very accurate data about idle usage, for example https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy-consumption-ESPRIMO-P9013.pdf https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy... In one case I had a nuc where on Linux after enabling power saving features for the sata controller, idle usage even fell to 5W when the pdf claimed 9. Having an actual pc instead of a random sbc ensures best connectivity, expandability, and software support forever. With almost all sbcs you're stuck with a random-ass kernel from when the damn thing was released, and you basically have to frankenstein together your own up-to-date distro with the old kernel because the vendor certainly doesn't care about updating the random armbian fork they created for that thing.

k8sToGo 2y ago
I have a nuc but how do I connect 6 hdds to it?
- edmundsauto 2y ago
  Add a disk shelf :). Basically supplies power and data cabling for just a rack of drives. Those get interfaced with the NUC via a host based adapter.
  - justin_murray 2y ago
    Can you elaborate? What’s the economic way to do this?
    - inhumantsar 2y ago
      Used PCIe HBA cards pulled from retired servers can be found on eBay for ~$50. They have external facing ports and/or internal facing ports. External is the way to go if you're using a small form factor PC like a business class Lenovo. These are almost all low profile cards, so they will fit in any SFF PC with a PCIe slot. There are special cables which will connect one port on the card to four SATA- or SAS-based disks. The PC's PSU will need SATA power on its cables or else you'll need to scavenge a separate PSU and use the paper clip trick (or better yet, a purpose built connector) to get it to power things on without a motherboard connected. Once you have all of that, then it's just a matter of housing the disks. People have done this with everything from threaded rod and plastidip to 3D printed disk racks to used enterprise JBOD enclosures (Just a Bunch Of Disks, no joke). Total cost for this setup, excluding the disks, can easily be done for less than $200 if you're patient and look for local deals, like a Craiglist post for a bunch of old server hardware that says "free, just come haul it away". Check or r/DataHoarder on reddit or ServeTheHome's blog
      - account42 2y ago
        A NUC won't have PCIe expansion slots. You are pretty much stuck with the external ports that come with it.
        edmundsauto 2y ago
        It looks like some NUCs have M.2 adapter slots that allow PCIe. Seems possible to do with a NUC, you probably can't put 20 drives with it, but 12-16 extra drives sounds feasible. https://www.reddit.com/r/intelnuc/comments/ibchlz/nuc_m2_sata_hba_lots_of_drives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/intelnuc/comments/ibchlz/nuc_m2_sat...
    - gosub100 2y ago
      they make external HDD chassis that connect via USB. I don't have any experience with them so I can't comment on their reliability, but search for "ORICO 5 Bay USB to SATA Hard Drive Enclosure".
      - freddie_mercury 2y ago
        FWIW, I wouldn't recommend Orico. I don't live in the US so my options are somewhat limited but I found a local retailer that carries Orico. I've had five of them in the past five years and four died within 12-18 months. If it was just one, I'd put it down to random bad luck. But with that many failures I assume they are doing something stupid/cheap. Usually they would simply fail to power on but sometimes individual slots seemed to die (which RAID just loooooves). And having an entire enclosure fail and waiting days/weeks for a replacement sucks as you lose access to all your data. I eventually bought a Jonsbo N3 off of Aliexpress and PCI SATA card (to support more than the 2-4 drives most motherboards support) and that has been working well for months.
        gosub100 2y ago
        I've never tried Orico, that was just the first brand that came up when I searched. I suspect these things are fundamentally unreliable, especially because they are powered by external AC adaptors, meaning there is no real ground between the two switching power sources (one in your PC, the other in the HDD caddy). It's either due to that, or due to the very sensitive signaling along the line, that eventually you get USB disconnects (if you try to run it as an appliance) that wreaks havoc on filesystems, particularly RAID. The Jonsbo N3 is not comparable. I own one as well (how quiet is yours? I upgraded the rear fan but my CPU fan is noisy), but it's a complete PC case, not an external HDD array.
      - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
        Highpoint has some decent-ish toaster-style drive docks. I have an a couple of the older model with dual drives dual usb-a ports - 5422A - but the Highpoint RocketStor 3112D seems available for $70 with a single 10Gbit usb-c port and dual drives. There is one deeply troubling flaw to them though, they don't turn back on of the power goes out, until you physically hit the button again. I think this is alas all to common for many of these enclosures!
- transpute 2y ago
  Thunderbolt/USB4 -> NVME enclosure -> M.2-to-SATA OR M.2-to PCIe to HBA-to-SATA.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  You can buy a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) enclosure[1], some even support RAID. If your Nuc is multipurpose, you could then run a virtualized TrueNAS guest (BSD or linux) in QEMU and give it control of the DAS block device for ZFS pools. Being able to run a virtual NAS that actually gets security updates on demand is pretty neat - TrueNAS has an excellent API you can use to start/stop services (SMB, SSH, iSCSI, etc) as well as shutdown the vm cleanly. 1. Newer DAS devices connect using USB-C, but USB type-A/e-SATA ones can be found. Edit: figuring out how to run TrueNAS as a guest OS was a nightmare, the first 5+ page of results will be about TrueNAS as a host.
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    Isn't running a NAS on top of USB storage very strongly discouraged? TrueNAS cautions against it. I also want to set up a NAS on a mini-PC with some sort of attached external storage, but I haven't been able to get past this blocker. USB is the only external interface these mini PCs typically support.
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      > I also want to set up a NAS on a mini-PC with some sort of attached external storage, but I haven't been able to get past this blocker You could also buy a PCIe to multiport SATA (RAID) card, but you'll also need a bigger[1] NAS-like case[2] to house the hard drives and multiple power cables for the drives 1. Depending on how mini your PC is and how many drives you want to attach to it 2. I have noticed any case that's sufficiently NAS-like (hotswap trays) is sold at a premium.
    - k8sToGo 2y ago
      You aren’t wrong. USB is not a good way to do this.
    - jofla_net 2y ago
      There are issues with USB from a compatibility standpoint. I think its mainly a factor of the ubiquity of it, there are SO many poor controller chips out there, even when you buy seemingly reputable hubs/drive cases. Its hard to find a good one sometimes. I did, however, stumble upon a gem early on, it was a 3.5" usb drive case from BestBuy which has since been discontinued(because it was good). Never in 15 years has any of the half dozen ones i got dropped from thier system. This is more than i could say about alot of pricey stuff on amazon sadly. Its typically manifested as a random loss in connectivity to the system. Similarly, heres a very low power writeup I did for using 2.5" drives with a dedicated power hub/splitter. http://www.jofla.net/?p=00000106#00000106 http://www.jofla.net/?p=00000106#00000106 This will still have issues if the mains lines sag (a pole goes down somewhere), but you can fix it with a reboot remotely. Other than that it works great. This was/is definitely a labor of love, primarily as I've come from a time when all you could get for a server were huge boxes idling at 50 watts, so i felt guilty of all the power I used to consume.
djupblue 2y ago
Parkytowers is site about repurposing thin clients of various kinds, it's a goldmine for finding out power consumption, Linux compatibility, possible hardware mods, etc: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml
jtwaleson 2y ago
I'm looking for a machine like this (affordable, small, low power usage) with 64GB memory. If anyone has any recommendations I'm all ears.
- transpute 2y ago
  Some Lenovo Tiny models, https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thinkcentre-thinkstation-tiny-project-tinyminimicro-reference-thread.34925/ https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thi...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  Old business laptops work well
- fransje26 2y ago
  There was this article on lobste.rs yesterday: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2024-07-02-ryzen-7-mini-pc-low-power-proxmox-hypervisor/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2024-07-02-ryzen-7-mini-... Perhaps it can be configured to meet your requirement for "affordable"?
- adrian_b 2y ago
  The cheapest computers with Alder Lake N CPUs, like ODROID H4 and many others, have only a single SODIMM socket and they are limited to 48 GB (which works, despite Ark advertising a limit of only 16 GB). However there are many NUC-like small computers made by various Chinese companies, with AMD Ryzen CPUs and with 2 SODIMM sockets, in which you can use 64 GB of DRAM. Those using older Ryzen models, like the 5000 series, may be found at prices between $220 and $350. Those using newer Ryzen models, up to Zen 4 based 7000 or 8000 series, are more expensive, i.e. between $400 and $600. While there are dozens of very cheap computer models made by Chinese firms, the similar models made by ASUS or the like are significantly more expensive. After the Intel NUC line has been bought by ASUS, they have raised its prices a lot. Even so, if a non-Chinese computer is desired and 64 GB is the only requirement, then Intel NUCs from older generations like NUC 13 or NUC 12, with Core i3 CPUs, can still be found at prices between $350 and $400 (the traditional prices of barebone Intel NUCs were $350 for Core i3, $500 for Core i5 and $650 for Core i7, but they have been raised a lot for the latest models). EDIT: Looking now at Newegg, I see various variants of ASUS NUC 14 Pro with the Intel Core 3 100U CPU, which are under $400 (barebone). It should be noted that this CPU is a Raptor Lake Refresh and not a Meteor Lake CPU, like in the more expensive models of NUC 14 Pro. This is a small computer designed to work reliably for many years on a 24/7 schedule, so if reliability would be important, especially when using it as a server, I would choose this. It supports up to 96 GB of DRAM (with two 48 GB SODIMMs). If performance per dollar would be more important, then there are cheaper and faster computers with Ryzen CPUs, made by Chinese companies like Minisforum or Beelink.
stragies 2y ago
I was under the impression, that for most (popular) chip families, like RockChip, Allwinner, Amlogic, some assorted Broadcoms, .. the Mainline linux kernel support has mostly been sorted for, and it's only the stragglers like Hisilicon, Huawei, Most Broadcom, Qualmcomm where mainline support is not on their priority list?
- numpad0 2y ago
  Maybe, but regular distros on x86/x64 thin clients are even more sorted out. GPIOs are better handled through an Arduino clone over USB than with scripts running on inherently laggy desktop OS.
  - stragies 2y ago
    After configuring the vendor uBoot to chainload into a newer uBoot-compile with JustEnoughUEFI compiled in, you can just launch the standard Debian Arm64/UEFI install iso on many/most(?) popular SOCs. W.r.t. GPIOs, I agree, that delegating that to an e.g. Arduino connected via USB/UART or one of the available internal(often RTC), or external(HDMI/VGA) I2C connections as an I2C slave is the preferred solution.
- shadowpho 2y ago
  Depends what you mean by “kernel support”. In general it does not really include decent idle power optimizations even on say raspberry pi.
  - stragies 2y ago
    IDLE power optimizations are pretty low on my list when I look for an SBS/SOC, I must admit. Do you have a list of remaining, large deficits in Linux power management, because I'm not finding many urgent open issues in that area?
- ComputerGuru 2y ago
  Does Raspberry Pi fit your definition/mental model of a straggler? It doesn’t have mainline support either!
Tijdreiziger 2y ago
I’ve also heard the same advice with Dell/HP SFF PC’s. BTW, your link requires a username/password login.
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  That's... Odd. I didn't click my own link yesterday after posting, but that was straight from Google and it did load just fine. Now I get the login too. But for completeness sake, another example: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/wp_ESPRIMO_P758_E94.pdf https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/wp_ESPRIMO_P758_E94.pd...
  - fransje26 2y ago
    HN possibly sent too much traffic their way, and someone, somewhere decided to require credentials for access perhaps? :-)
    - numpad0 2y ago
      That happens. I've once foolishly linked brochure page for a trash-found HSM on social media, supposedly that logged too many referrers server side, and the URL was mis-configured into something else less than a day later. It wasn't even a 404.
- gh02t 2y ago
  Have had great success with this myself. Oddly resellers on Amazon seem to be the best source I have found, just search for something like "HP ProDesk" or one of the generic corporate-focused lines from other manufacturers and find one that fits your budget. Maybe filter to 100-300 dollars to get rid of the new stuff. There's also a surprisingly vast selection of recycled commodity servers and similar on there, too.
mech422 2y ago
ODroid H-series SBC's are standard Intel CPUs with (at least for the H2+) Linux supported hardware for pretty much everything (haven't tried running X on them though :-P ) they are my favorite 'home server' currently...cheap, standard, and expandable - oh! And SILENT! :-)
- oynqr 2y ago
  They also have this magic feature where they can use ECC with non-ECC RAM, at the cost of some capacity.
  - CTDOCodebases 2y ago
    Where can I read more about this?
    - taneliv 2y ago
      From Unraid forum thread[1] there's links to another forum[2] and a wiki page[3]. Not yet sure myself what all of this means, but it looks interesting. [1] https://forums.unraid.net/topic/167669-odroid-h4-intel-n97-2x25gbit-4x-sata-1x-m2-ddr5-max-48gb-with-ecc/ https://forums.unraid.net/topic/167669-odroid-h4-intel-n97-2... [2] https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?p=384823#p384823 https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?p=384823#p384823 [3] https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h4/hardware/h4_bios_update#bios_release https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h4/hardware/h4_bios_update#bi...
      - CTDOCodebases 2y ago
        Thanks for the links.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      In general some of the Intel Atom CPUs intended for embedded applications support the so-called In-Band ECC, where a part of the memory is reserved for storing ECC codes. Two of the three ODROID H4 variants use the "Intel Processor N97" CPU, which is intended for embedded applications and it appears to support In-Band ECC, even if this is not clearly advertised on Intel Ark (i.e. at other CPUs of the Alder Lake N family, like i3-N305, at ECC Support it says "No", but at N97 it says neither "Yes" nor "No", but it is mentioned that it is intended for embedded applications, not for consumer applications, and the embedded models normally support In-Band ECC). The ODROID H4 BIOS allows to enable In-Band ECC on ODROID H4 or ODROID H4+ (the latter is slightly more expensive at $139, but it has more I/O, including two 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports and four SATA ports; to the bare board you must add between $10 and $20 for the case, depending on its size, and a few other $ for SATA cables, RTC battery and optionally a cooling fan; you must also buy one 16 GB or 32 GB DDR5-4800 SODIMM, so after adding shipping and taxes a NAS would cost a little more than $200, besides the SSDs or HDDs). You can see test results with ECC enabled at: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-review-intel-n97-nas-kit-fanless-sbc-ubuntu-24-04/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-revie...
green-salt 2y ago
My local electronics resale shop had the Dell versions of these, they make great hypervisors!
lifeisstillgood 2y ago
Years ago there were auction houses specialising in selling off business recycled PCs and bankrupt stock - it was great fun to go and mooch around and see if there was a real bargain not spotted, but they seemed to vanish under the onslaught of eBay and frankly for second hand tag I struggle to trust ebay
- marcus0x62 2y ago
  I’ve had good luck recently (sample size: 2) buying small form factor PCs off of ebay. Way more powerful than even a new raspberry pi, and a 4 core/16G RAM/256 ssd machine can be had for less than $60 if you are patient.
firecall 2y ago
Here in Australia there are thousands of ex-Lease Dell 7060 SFF and 7060 Micros PCs on aucation sites every week. The Dell's coming off lease now have modern features including Intel 8th Gen CPUs with TPM and USB-C etc...
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  in my experience those come from mining and other FIFO operations that are shutting down. source: used to de-com those, wipe em, and get them ready for bulk sale to a different group.
themoonisachees 2y ago
These boxes are also great for running a k8s cluster if you want to experiment.
beAbU 2y ago
Don't share this information too far and wide, you might drive up the price for these in the second hand market, which will hurt us dirt-cheap-pc-gluts. I cannot say no to cheap compute for some reason.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- danparsonson 2y ago
  > I cannot say no to cheap compute for some reason. I sympathise - for me I think it comes from growing up with early generation PCs that were expensive, hard to get, and not very performant; now you can buy something that's a supercomputer by comparison for almost nothing. Who can resist that?! I'll think of something to do with them all eventually...
jnsaff2 2y ago
Correct. I have a 5 node Fujitsu esprimo D756/D757 cluster that has i5-6500 CPU's and 96GB RAM and 5x NVMe + 5x HDD that usually sits around 80W total. Removing HDD and reducing RAM would drop the power usage but in my case it's not important to go after the last Watt. I bought them them for 50 euro a piece without RAM and disks.
hnarn 2y ago
I bought one of those thin Lenovo clients for about $200 and use it as a home server with Debian, it works great for pretty much everything and is a lot more bang for your buck than raspberry pi or a brand new mini-pc. The only downside is that it doesn't have space for multiple 2,5/3,5 disks, but that is just personal preference anyway.
Probiotic6081 2y ago
[dead]
throwaway2037 2y ago
I never heard of "nuc" before this post. I found: > Next Unit of Computing (NUC) is a line of small-form-factor barebone computer kits designed by Intel. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Unit_of_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Unit_of_Computing They look even smaller than one litre PCs.
pelasaco 2y ago
I have since years, an usb disk connected to my Fritzbox and it works amazingly well. I have a real NAS, but i ended up never using it. Fritzbox with the USB disk is enough to use as scanner dropbox, saving pictures, documents, ROMs.. Sometimes the simplicity beats the whole complication of having extra devices

k8sToGo 2y ago

I have a nuc but how do I connect 6 hdds to it?

edmundsauto 2y ago
Add a disk shelf :). Basically supplies power and data cabling for just a rack of drives. Those get interfaced with the NUC via a host based adapter.
- justin_murray 2y ago
  Can you elaborate? What’s the economic way to do this?
  - inhumantsar 2y ago
    Used PCIe HBA cards pulled from retired servers can be found on eBay for ~$50. They have external facing ports and/or internal facing ports. External is the way to go if you're using a small form factor PC like a business class Lenovo. These are almost all low profile cards, so they will fit in any SFF PC with a PCIe slot. There are special cables which will connect one port on the card to four SATA- or SAS-based disks. The PC's PSU will need SATA power on its cables or else you'll need to scavenge a separate PSU and use the paper clip trick (or better yet, a purpose built connector) to get it to power things on without a motherboard connected. Once you have all of that, then it's just a matter of housing the disks. People have done this with everything from threaded rod and plastidip to 3D printed disk racks to used enterprise JBOD enclosures (Just a Bunch Of Disks, no joke). Total cost for this setup, excluding the disks, can easily be done for less than $200 if you're patient and look for local deals, like a Craiglist post for a bunch of old server hardware that says "free, just come haul it away". Check or r/DataHoarder on reddit or ServeTheHome's blog
    - account42 2y ago
      A NUC won't have PCIe expansion slots. You are pretty much stuck with the external ports that come with it.
      - edmundsauto 2y ago
        It looks like some NUCs have M.2 adapter slots that allow PCIe. Seems possible to do with a NUC, you probably can't put 20 drives with it, but 12-16 extra drives sounds feasible. https://www.reddit.com/r/intelnuc/comments/ibchlz/nuc_m2_sata_hba_lots_of_drives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/intelnuc/comments/ibchlz/nuc_m2_sat...
  - gosub100 2y ago
    they make external HDD chassis that connect via USB. I don't have any experience with them so I can't comment on their reliability, but search for "ORICO 5 Bay USB to SATA Hard Drive Enclosure".
    - freddie_mercury 2y ago
      FWIW, I wouldn't recommend Orico. I don't live in the US so my options are somewhat limited but I found a local retailer that carries Orico. I've had five of them in the past five years and four died within 12-18 months. If it was just one, I'd put it down to random bad luck. But with that many failures I assume they are doing something stupid/cheap. Usually they would simply fail to power on but sometimes individual slots seemed to die (which RAID just loooooves). And having an entire enclosure fail and waiting days/weeks for a replacement sucks as you lose access to all your data. I eventually bought a Jonsbo N3 off of Aliexpress and PCI SATA card (to support more than the 2-4 drives most motherboards support) and that has been working well for months.
      - gosub100 2y ago
        I've never tried Orico, that was just the first brand that came up when I searched. I suspect these things are fundamentally unreliable, especially because they are powered by external AC adaptors, meaning there is no real ground between the two switching power sources (one in your PC, the other in the HDD caddy). It's either due to that, or due to the very sensitive signaling along the line, that eventually you get USB disconnects (if you try to run it as an appliance) that wreaks havoc on filesystems, particularly RAID. The Jonsbo N3 is not comparable. I own one as well (how quiet is yours? I upgraded the rear fan but my CPU fan is noisy), but it's a complete PC case, not an external HDD array.
    - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
      Highpoint has some decent-ish toaster-style drive docks. I have an a couple of the older model with dual drives dual usb-a ports - 5422A - but the Highpoint RocketStor 3112D seems available for $70 with a single 10Gbit usb-c port and dual drives. There is one deeply troubling flaw to them though, they don't turn back on of the power goes out, until you physically hit the button again. I think this is alas all to common for many of these enclosures!
transpute 2y ago
Thunderbolt/USB4 -> NVME enclosure -> M.2-to-SATA OR M.2-to PCIe to HBA-to-SATA.
sangnoir 2y ago
You can buy a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) enclosure[1], some even support RAID. If your Nuc is multipurpose, you could then run a virtualized TrueNAS guest (BSD or linux) in QEMU and give it control of the DAS block device for ZFS pools. Being able to run a virtual NAS that actually gets security updates on demand is pretty neat - TrueNAS has an excellent API you can use to start/stop services (SMB, SSH, iSCSI, etc) as well as shutdown the vm cleanly. 1. Newer DAS devices connect using USB-C, but USB type-A/e-SATA ones can be found. Edit: figuring out how to run TrueNAS as a guest OS was a nightmare, the first 5+ page of results will be about TrueNAS as a host.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  Isn't running a NAS on top of USB storage very strongly discouraged? TrueNAS cautions against it. I also want to set up a NAS on a mini-PC with some sort of attached external storage, but I haven't been able to get past this blocker. USB is the only external interface these mini PCs typically support.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > I also want to set up a NAS on a mini-PC with some sort of attached external storage, but I haven't been able to get past this blocker You could also buy a PCIe to multiport SATA (RAID) card, but you'll also need a bigger[1] NAS-like case[2] to house the hard drives and multiple power cables for the drives 1. Depending on how mini your PC is and how many drives you want to attach to it 2. I have noticed any case that's sufficiently NAS-like (hotswap trays) is sold at a premium.
  - k8sToGo 2y ago
    You aren’t wrong. USB is not a good way to do this.
  - jofla_net 2y ago
    There are issues with USB from a compatibility standpoint. I think its mainly a factor of the ubiquity of it, there are SO many poor controller chips out there, even when you buy seemingly reputable hubs/drive cases. Its hard to find a good one sometimes. I did, however, stumble upon a gem early on, it was a 3.5" usb drive case from BestBuy which has since been discontinued(because it was good). Never in 15 years has any of the half dozen ones i got dropped from thier system. This is more than i could say about alot of pricey stuff on amazon sadly. Its typically manifested as a random loss in connectivity to the system. Similarly, heres a very low power writeup I did for using 2.5" drives with a dedicated power hub/splitter. http://www.jofla.net/?p=00000106#00000106 http://www.jofla.net/?p=00000106#00000106 This will still have issues if the mains lines sag (a pole goes down somewhere), but you can fix it with a reboot remotely. Other than that it works great. This was/is definitely a labor of love, primarily as I've come from a time when all you could get for a server were huge boxes idling at 50 watts, so i felt guilty of all the power I used to consume.

djupblue 2y ago

Parkytowers is site about repurposing thin clients of various kinds, it's a goldmine for finding out power consumption, Linux compatibility, possible hardware mods, etc: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml

jtwaleson 2y ago

I'm looking for a machine like this (affordable, small, low power usage) with 64GB memory. If anyone has any recommendations I'm all ears.

transpute 2y ago
Some Lenovo Tiny models, https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thinkcentre-thinkstation-tiny-project-tinyminimicro-reference-thread.34925/ https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thi...
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Old business laptops work well
fransje26 2y ago
There was this article on lobste.rs yesterday: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2024-07-02-ryzen-7-mini-pc-low-power-proxmox-hypervisor/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2024-07-02-ryzen-7-mini-... Perhaps it can be configured to meet your requirement for "affordable"?
adrian_b 2y ago
The cheapest computers with Alder Lake N CPUs, like ODROID H4 and many others, have only a single SODIMM socket and they are limited to 48 GB (which works, despite Ark advertising a limit of only 16 GB). However there are many NUC-like small computers made by various Chinese companies, with AMD Ryzen CPUs and with 2 SODIMM sockets, in which you can use 64 GB of DRAM. Those using older Ryzen models, like the 5000 series, may be found at prices between $220 and $350. Those using newer Ryzen models, up to Zen 4 based 7000 or 8000 series, are more expensive, i.e. between $400 and $600. While there are dozens of very cheap computer models made by Chinese firms, the similar models made by ASUS or the like are significantly more expensive. After the Intel NUC line has been bought by ASUS, they have raised its prices a lot. Even so, if a non-Chinese computer is desired and 64 GB is the only requirement, then Intel NUCs from older generations like NUC 13 or NUC 12, with Core i3 CPUs, can still be found at prices between $350 and $400 (the traditional prices of barebone Intel NUCs were $350 for Core i3, $500 for Core i5 and $650 for Core i7, but they have been raised a lot for the latest models). EDIT: Looking now at Newegg, I see various variants of ASUS NUC 14 Pro with the Intel Core 3 100U CPU, which are under $400 (barebone). It should be noted that this CPU is a Raptor Lake Refresh and not a Meteor Lake CPU, like in the more expensive models of NUC 14 Pro. This is a small computer designed to work reliably for many years on a 24/7 schedule, so if reliability would be important, especially when using it as a server, I would choose this. It supports up to 96 GB of DRAM (with two 48 GB SODIMMs). If performance per dollar would be more important, then there are cheaper and faster computers with Ryzen CPUs, made by Chinese companies like Minisforum or Beelink.

stragies 2y ago

I was under the impression, that for most (popular) chip families, like RockChip, Allwinner, Amlogic, some assorted Broadcoms, .. the Mainline linux kernel support has mostly been sorted for, and it's only the stragglers like Hisilicon, Huawei, Most Broadcom, Qualmcomm where mainline support is not on their priority list?

numpad0 2y ago
Maybe, but regular distros on x86/x64 thin clients are even more sorted out. GPIOs are better handled through an Arduino clone over USB than with scripts running on inherently laggy desktop OS.
- stragies 2y ago
  After configuring the vendor uBoot to chainload into a newer uBoot-compile with JustEnoughUEFI compiled in, you can just launch the standard Debian Arm64/UEFI install iso on many/most(?) popular SOCs. W.r.t. GPIOs, I agree, that delegating that to an e.g. Arduino connected via USB/UART or one of the available internal(often RTC), or external(HDMI/VGA) I2C connections as an I2C slave is the preferred solution.
shadowpho 2y ago
Depends what you mean by “kernel support”. In general it does not really include decent idle power optimizations even on say raspberry pi.
- stragies 2y ago
  IDLE power optimizations are pretty low on my list when I look for an SBS/SOC, I must admit. Do you have a list of remaining, large deficits in Linux power management, because I'm not finding many urgent open issues in that area?
ComputerGuru 2y ago
Does Raspberry Pi fit your definition/mental model of a straggler? It doesn’t have mainline support either!

Tijdreiziger 2y ago

I’ve also heard the same advice with Dell/HP SFF PC’s. BTW, your link requires a username/password login.

iforgotpassword 2y ago
That's... Odd. I didn't click my own link yesterday after posting, but that was straight from Google and it did load just fine. Now I get the login too. But for completeness sake, another example: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/wp_ESPRIMO_P758_E94.pdf https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/wp_ESPRIMO_P758_E94.pd...
- fransje26 2y ago
  HN possibly sent too much traffic their way, and someone, somewhere decided to require credentials for access perhaps? :-)
  - numpad0 2y ago
    That happens. I've once foolishly linked brochure page for a trash-found HSM on social media, supposedly that logged too many referrers server side, and the URL was mis-configured into something else less than a day later. It wasn't even a 404.
gh02t 2y ago
Have had great success with this myself. Oddly resellers on Amazon seem to be the best source I have found, just search for something like "HP ProDesk" or one of the generic corporate-focused lines from other manufacturers and find one that fits your budget. Maybe filter to 100-300 dollars to get rid of the new stuff. There's also a surprisingly vast selection of recycled commodity servers and similar on there, too.

mech422 2y ago

ODroid H-series SBC's are standard Intel CPUs with (at least for the H2+) Linux supported hardware for pretty much everything (haven't tried running X on them though :-P ) they are my favorite 'home server' currently...cheap, standard, and expandable - oh! And SILENT! :-)

oynqr 2y ago
They also have this magic feature where they can use ECC with non-ECC RAM, at the cost of some capacity.
- CTDOCodebases 2y ago
  Where can I read more about this?
  - taneliv 2y ago
    From Unraid forum thread[1] there's links to another forum[2] and a wiki page[3]. Not yet sure myself what all of this means, but it looks interesting. [1] https://forums.unraid.net/topic/167669-odroid-h4-intel-n97-2x25gbit-4x-sata-1x-m2-ddr5-max-48gb-with-ecc/ https://forums.unraid.net/topic/167669-odroid-h4-intel-n97-2... [2] https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?p=384823#p384823 https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?p=384823#p384823 [3] https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h4/hardware/h4_bios_update#bios_release https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h4/hardware/h4_bios_update#bi...
    - CTDOCodebases 2y ago
      Thanks for the links.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    In general some of the Intel Atom CPUs intended for embedded applications support the so-called In-Band ECC, where a part of the memory is reserved for storing ECC codes. Two of the three ODROID H4 variants use the "Intel Processor N97" CPU, which is intended for embedded applications and it appears to support In-Band ECC, even if this is not clearly advertised on Intel Ark (i.e. at other CPUs of the Alder Lake N family, like i3-N305, at ECC Support it says "No", but at N97 it says neither "Yes" nor "No", but it is mentioned that it is intended for embedded applications, not for consumer applications, and the embedded models normally support In-Band ECC). The ODROID H4 BIOS allows to enable In-Band ECC on ODROID H4 or ODROID H4+ (the latter is slightly more expensive at $139, but it has more I/O, including two 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports and four SATA ports; to the bare board you must add between $10 and $20 for the case, depending on its size, and a few other $ for SATA cables, RTC battery and optionally a cooling fan; you must also buy one 16 GB or 32 GB DDR5-4800 SODIMM, so after adding shipping and taxes a NAS would cost a little more than $200, besides the SSDs or HDDs). You can see test results with ECC enabled at: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-review-intel-n97-nas-kit-fanless-sbc-ubuntu-24-04/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-revie...

green-salt 2y ago

My local electronics resale shop had the Dell versions of these, they make great hypervisors!

lifeisstillgood 2y ago

Years ago there were auction houses specialising in selling off business recycled PCs and bankrupt stock - it was great fun to go and mooch around and see if there was a real bargain not spotted, but they seemed to vanish under the onslaught of eBay and frankly for second hand tag I struggle to trust ebay

marcus0x62 2y ago
I’ve had good luck recently (sample size: 2) buying small form factor PCs off of ebay. Way more powerful than even a new raspberry pi, and a 4 core/16G RAM/256 ssd machine can be had for less than $60 if you are patient.

firecall 2y ago

Here in Australia there are thousands of ex-Lease Dell 7060 SFF and 7060 Micros PCs on aucation sites every week. The Dell's coming off lease now have modern features including Intel 8th Gen CPUs with TPM and USB-C etc...

red-iron-pine 2y ago
in my experience those come from mining and other FIFO operations that are shutting down. source: used to de-com those, wipe em, and get them ready for bulk sale to a different group.

themoonisachees 2y ago

These boxes are also great for running a k8s cluster if you want to experiment.

beAbU 2y ago

Don't share this information too far and wide, you might drive up the price for these in the second hand market, which will hurt us dirt-cheap-pc-gluts. I cannot say no to cheap compute for some reason.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
danparsonson 2y ago
> I cannot say no to cheap compute for some reason. I sympathise - for me I think it comes from growing up with early generation PCs that were expensive, hard to get, and not very performant; now you can buy something that's a supercomputer by comparison for almost nothing. Who can resist that?! I'll think of something to do with them all eventually...

jnsaff2 2y ago

Correct. I have a 5 node Fujitsu esprimo D756/D757 cluster that has i5-6500 CPU's and 96GB RAM and 5x NVMe + 5x HDD that usually sits around 80W total. Removing HDD and reducing RAM would drop the power usage but in my case it's not important to go after the last Watt. I bought them them for 50 euro a piece without RAM and disks.

hnarn 2y ago

I bought one of those thin Lenovo clients for about $200 and use it as a home server with Debian, it works great for pretty much everything and is a lot more bang for your buck than raspberry pi or a brand new mini-pc. The only downside is that it doesn't have space for multiple 2,5/3,5 disks, but that is just personal preference anyway.

Probiotic6081 2y ago

[dead]

throwaway2037 2y ago

I never heard of "nuc" before this post. I found: > Next Unit of Computing (NUC) is a line of small-form-factor barebone computer kits designed by Intel. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Unit_of_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Unit_of_Computing They look even smaller than one litre PCs.

pelasaco 2y ago

I have since years, an usb disk connected to my Fritzbox and it works amazingly well. I have a real NAS, but i ended up never using it. Fritzbox with the USB disk is enough to use as scanner dropbox, saving pictures, documents, ROMs.. Sometimes the simplicity beats the whole complication of having extra devices