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Sysadmin here. Agreed. 1 or 2U servers for home use is fairly ridiculous. In fact, its kinda ridiculous for some business use now. We're probably only a few yea

Sysadmin here. Agreed. 1 or 2U servers for home use is fairly ridiculous. In fact, its kinda ridiculous for some business use now. We're probably only a few years away from a mainstream and popular form-factor that's a fraction of the size, with tiny SSDs instead of giant spinning drives and power-sipping x86 or ARM chips. Imagine something the size of a stack of 4 or 5 ipads replacing the typical 19" racked server. For small and perhaps even medium business, this could be a good fit. The 19" rack really is something from a past era. Soon people will look at it the same way I look at old mainframes and minicomputers. As far as the article goes, $300 is impressive, but the costs of wasted electricity will eat up the savings eventually compared to just dropping some cash on a new Synology NAS, and you get a warranty.

Roritharr 12y ago
There is a Hamburg based startup called Protonet which are targeting smaller agencys with basically the formfactor you describe. They offer a drop-in solution that acts as your wifi ap, provides everything from "local cloud" data storage to offering a complete groupware solution ontop of it. Thats why they are so expensive, but their potential customerbase is huge and they've got the product design in a good position. (Not affiliated with protonet anyhow, just like the stuff they do.) https://protonet.info/en/product/comparison/ https://protonet.info/en/product/comparison/
theonewolf 12y ago
Agree with you and the OP, for me I always work with these servers (or am supposed to with my cloud research), and wanted to toy around with one on my own. The noise of the CS24-SC actually isn't so bad (as others report). The power is 400W, less pulled when the whole system is idled. So not horrible. We do not run 24/7, this isn't being used as a traditional server. We turn it on to manipulate large VM images (my case), or to run an algorithm that needs a lot of RAM and cores (her case). So it runs at most 8-10 hours, 2-4 times a week.
existencebox 12y ago
Sysadmin as well, proudly running a 4U supermicro box as my home fileserver. If I can find a tower that can hot swappably fit that many drives, I'd look twice, but there are some other small advantages. Redundant power is nice in some situations, as is ECC if you really care about that sort of thing. Finally, given the sheer amount of processor overhead a dual socket gives you, it was easy for me to also utilize the machine as a VM server. As other posts have pointed out, an out of box IPMI system is additionally hard to turn down; these are all capabilities that I simply have not found together in commodity products. My point I guess, is that I think there's still situations that merit rolling your own "Server box", even at home. (Not to disagree with anything you said, but to provide my own outlook)
curun1r 12y ago
I don't think a Synology would have the horsepower that the story author was after. He specified that he was going to be chewing through large datasets, so the dual Xeons @2.3GHz were important to him. Synologies are great for what they do, but underpowered for CPU/RAM-intensive tasks...at least in the sub $500 range, which is what he was looking to spend. I'm a happy Synology owner, but I don't use it for my dev server. It sits behind my VPN and serves media files. With the variable speed drives (WD Green) and ARM chip, it draws very little power. In short, I love it for the specific purpose for which it was designed, but I wouldn't use it for much else. My dev server is in AWS. It's just too easy to spin up and spin down whenever I need it and keeps me from having to devote space in my apartment (SF aint cheap!). Also, not having a hefty power bill is nice. If I were advising the story author, I'd tell him that unless part of the enjoyment is building and running the thing, he should opt for a cloud provider instead. He could get a DO droplet spec'd beyond the physical server he bought for $0.12/hr and spin it up whenever he wanted to use it. Unless he's planning on using it almost continuously, you can fit a lot of 12-cent hours into a $310 budget, and that's before you consider the increased energy usage from running a server at home.
- arthurfm 12y ago
  > With the variable speed drives (WD Green) None of Western Digital's HDDs change their RPM. It is fixed.
  - curun1r 12y ago
    The WD docs for Intellipower indicate that RPM is one of the things they vary to conserve power. I can't find much in the way of specifics, but since they list the RPM of the drives as "Intellipower", the assumption would be that they don't operate at a fixed RPM.
    - arthurfm 12y ago
      The RPM varies between different models. Each drive has a fixed RPM [1][2]. From SPCR: > Western Digital doesn't want to say that they're selling 5,400 RPM drives — those became second class in the desktop market years ago. Instead, they rate the drive's speed as "IntelliPower" and take pains to emphasize that there are other factors that affect performance. Western Digital has caught a lot of flak for withholding the rotation speed of the Green Power, especially when the product was first launched and the marketing material listed the rotation speed as 5,400-7,200 RPM. This led some to speculate that the rotation speed changed dynamically during use — which would have been an impressive engineering feat had it been true. The reality is revealed by a sentence that Western Digital added to the description of IntelliPower: "For each GreenPower™ drive model, WD may use a different, invariable RPM." In other words, Western Digital reserves the right to release both 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM drives under the Green Power name — without telling you which are which. We were able to confirm that our 750 GB Green Power had a spindle speed of 5,400 RPM by analyzing its sound spectrum. Why sound? Sound is vibration; the pitch of the sound corresponds to the frequency of the vibration. Hard drives vibrate at the speed of their motor, so they produce a noise at the same frequency as their rotation speed. Our sample had a sharp spike at exactly 90 Hz (cycles per second). Multiplying that number by 60 (to get cycles per minute) yielded a measured rotation speed of 5,400 RPM. [1] http://www.silentpcreview.com/article786-page2.html http://www.silentpcreview.com/article786-page2.html [2] http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=23526214#p23526214 http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=23526214#p23526...
gumby 12y ago
"The 19" rack really is something from a past era. Soon people will look at it the same way I look at old mainframes and minicomputers." Hah, you do realize that the origin of the 19 inch relay rack is indeed the original main frames (of phone systems). And the main frame of an early computer was naturally built on the same hardware infrastructure. And then the first "minis" (e.g. PDP-7, PDP-8, PDP-11, et al) were built on the 19 inch form factor too. I just had to point that part out; I completely agree with your main point: the remaining colo rack I use is a mix of 4U, 2U and 1U "servers" plus a couple of tower machines. This is for personal use; for work we don't bother to even own our own hardware infrastructure any more.

Roritharr 12y ago

There is a Hamburg based startup called Protonet which are targeting smaller agencys with basically the formfactor you describe. They offer a drop-in solution that acts as your wifi ap, provides everything from "local cloud" data storage to offering a complete groupware solution ontop of it. Thats why they are so expensive, but their potential customerbase is huge and they've got the product design in a good position. (Not affiliated with protonet anyhow, just like the stuff they do.) https://protonet.info/en/product/comparison/ https://protonet.info/en/product/comparison/

theonewolf 12y ago

Agree with you and the OP, for me I always work with these servers (or am supposed to with my cloud research), and wanted to toy around with one on my own. The noise of the CS24-SC actually isn't so bad (as others report). The power is 400W, less pulled when the whole system is idled. So not horrible. We do not run 24/7, this isn't being used as a traditional server. We turn it on to manipulate large VM images (my case), or to run an algorithm that needs a lot of RAM and cores (her case). So it runs at most 8-10 hours, 2-4 times a week.

existencebox 12y ago

Sysadmin as well, proudly running a 4U supermicro box as my home fileserver. If I can find a tower that can hot swappably fit that many drives, I'd look twice, but there are some other small advantages. Redundant power is nice in some situations, as is ECC if you really care about that sort of thing. Finally, given the sheer amount of processor overhead a dual socket gives you, it was easy for me to also utilize the machine as a VM server. As other posts have pointed out, an out of box IPMI system is additionally hard to turn down; these are all capabilities that I simply have not found together in commodity products. My point I guess, is that I think there's still situations that merit rolling your own "Server box", even at home. (Not to disagree with anything you said, but to provide my own outlook)

curun1r 12y ago

I don't think a Synology would have the horsepower that the story author was after. He specified that he was going to be chewing through large datasets, so the dual Xeons @2.3GHz were important to him. Synologies are great for what they do, but underpowered for CPU/RAM-intensive tasks...at least in the sub $500 range, which is what he was looking to spend. I'm a happy Synology owner, but I don't use it for my dev server. It sits behind my VPN and serves media files. With the variable speed drives (WD Green) and ARM chip, it draws very little power. In short, I love it for the specific purpose for which it was designed, but I wouldn't use it for much else. My dev server is in AWS. It's just too easy to spin up and spin down whenever I need it and keeps me from having to devote space in my apartment (SF aint cheap!). Also, not having a hefty power bill is nice. If I were advising the story author, I'd tell him that unless part of the enjoyment is building and running the thing, he should opt for a cloud provider instead. He could get a DO droplet spec'd beyond the physical server he bought for $0.12/hr and spin it up whenever he wanted to use it. Unless he's planning on using it almost continuously, you can fit a lot of 12-cent hours into a $310 budget, and that's before you consider the increased energy usage from running a server at home.

arthurfm 12y ago
> With the variable speed drives (WD Green) None of Western Digital's HDDs change their RPM. It is fixed.
- curun1r 12y ago
  The WD docs for Intellipower indicate that RPM is one of the things they vary to conserve power. I can't find much in the way of specifics, but since they list the RPM of the drives as "Intellipower", the assumption would be that they don't operate at a fixed RPM.
  - arthurfm 12y ago
    The RPM varies between different models. Each drive has a fixed RPM [1][2]. From SPCR: > Western Digital doesn't want to say that they're selling 5,400 RPM drives — those became second class in the desktop market years ago. Instead, they rate the drive's speed as "IntelliPower" and take pains to emphasize that there are other factors that affect performance. Western Digital has caught a lot of flak for withholding the rotation speed of the Green Power, especially when the product was first launched and the marketing material listed the rotation speed as 5,400-7,200 RPM. This led some to speculate that the rotation speed changed dynamically during use — which would have been an impressive engineering feat had it been true. The reality is revealed by a sentence that Western Digital added to the description of IntelliPower: "For each GreenPower™ drive model, WD may use a different, invariable RPM." In other words, Western Digital reserves the right to release both 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM drives under the Green Power name — without telling you which are which. We were able to confirm that our 750 GB Green Power had a spindle speed of 5,400 RPM by analyzing its sound spectrum. Why sound? Sound is vibration; the pitch of the sound corresponds to the frequency of the vibration. Hard drives vibrate at the speed of their motor, so they produce a noise at the same frequency as their rotation speed. Our sample had a sharp spike at exactly 90 Hz (cycles per second). Multiplying that number by 60 (to get cycles per minute) yielded a measured rotation speed of 5,400 RPM. [1] http://www.silentpcreview.com/article786-page2.html http://www.silentpcreview.com/article786-page2.html [2] http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=23526214#p23526214 http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=23526214#p23526...

gumby 12y ago

"The 19" rack really is something from a past era. Soon people will look at it the same way I look at old mainframes and minicomputers." Hah, you do realize that the origin of the 19 inch relay rack is indeed the original main frames (of phone systems). And the main frame of an early computer was naturally built on the same hardware infrastructure. And then the first "minis" (e.g. PDP-7, PDP-8, PDP-11, et al) were built on the 19 inch form factor too. I just had to point that part out; I completely agree with your main point: the remaining colo rack I use is a mix of 4U, 2U and 1U "servers" plus a couple of tower machines. This is for personal use; for work we don't bother to even own our own hardware infrastructure any more.