Meanwhile…
looks at old Thinkpad and raspi
You can get old servers on eBay for surprisingly little money, like this PowerEdge T410 for $200. Add some drives, install TrueNAS SCALE and you’ve got a good home server platform.
I have a ThinkServer with a similar Xeon, running proxmox -> Debian, so I was looking like “huh, interesting” until I saw the internals.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck all that. Damn it Dell, quit your weird bullshit. It’s just a motherboard, cpu, cooler, and ram. Slap in intake and exhaust fans. Figure it the fuck out.
E: and it better have a goddamn standard psu, too. Fuck yourself, Dell. I’ve seen your shit.
Hmm, I don’t have direct experience with ThinkServers, but what I see on eBay looks like standard ATX hardware… which is not really what you want in a server.
The Dell motherboard has dual CPU sockets and 8 RAM slots. The PSUs are not the common ATX desktop format because there are 2 of them and they are hot swappable. This is basically a rack server repacked into a desktop tower case, not an ATX desktop with a server CPU socket.
The one saving grace is that their one-off custom damn shit always feels well designed, and they move a lotta units (which helps with repairs when everything is GD custom). Dunno if that’s changed in recent years.
With that said I avoid them for personal use usually for the same reason, why have a desktop if you don’t get the benefit of parts compatibility?!
Isn’t that a bit like buying an old truck instead of a year old Miata?
Afaik those CPUs use so much juice when idling … sure, you dont get all them lanes or ECC, but a PC at the same price with a few year old CPU outclasses that CPU by a lot & at a fraction of the running cost (also quietly).
Just something to keep in mind as an alternative, especially when you don’t intend to fill all the pcie bussy (several users with several intensive tasks that benefit from wider bus to RAM & PCI even with a slow CPU).
Ok, and you miss out on some fancy admin stuff, but … it’s just for home use …
I always recommend buying enterprise grade hardware for this type of thing, for two reasons:
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Consumer-grade hardware is just that - it’s not built for long-term, constant workloads (that is, server workloads). It’s not built for redundancy. The Dell PowerEdge has hotswappable drive bays, a hardware RAID controller, dual CPU sockets, 8 RAM slots, dual built-in NICs, the iDrac interface, and redundant hot-swappable PSUs. It’s designed to be on all the time, reliably, and can be remotely managed.
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For a lot of people who are interested in this, a homelab is a path into a technology career. Working with enterprise hardware is better experience.
Consumer CPUs won’t perform server tasks like server CPUs. If you want to run a server, you want hardware that’s built for server workloads - stability, reliability, redundancy.
So I guess yes, it is like buying an old truck? Because you want to do work, not go fast.
Yeah server hardware isn’t the most efficient if you want to save power. It’s probably better to get a NUC or something.
With that said my old Dell PowerEdge R730 only uses around 84 watt (running around 5 VMs that are doing pretty much nothing) The server runs Proxmox and has 128 GB of ram, two Xeon E5-2667 v4 CPUs, 4 old used 1 TB HDDs I bought for cheap, and 4 old used 128 GB SATA SSDs I also bought for cheap (all storage is 2,5 drives).
All I had to do was change a few BIOS settings to prioritize efficiency over performance. 84 watts is obviously still not great but it’s not that bad.
I have been an IT professional since 1995. Never have I ever had a personal PC that wasn’t either a refurbished laptop or some sort of Frankenstein abomination that I put together from whatever was on sale and upcycled parts.
I have been an IT professional since 1995. Never have I ever had a personal PC that wasn’t either a refurbished laptop or some sort of Frankenstein abomination that I pit together from whatever was on sale and upcycled parts.
I’ve been in the game for about the same amount of time. I stopped doing that about 15 years ago when I saw that the electricity I was paying on older gear was equaling or exceeding the cost of buying newer, faster, and lower power consumption hardware.
Power costs is a poor tax in the same way skipping the dentist and getting a root canal later is.
Also in the process of power efficiency-izing my lab. It just wasn’t a feasible option before, I didn’t have the means. I just paid interest via electricity.
I swear it folk have the shittest hardware and jankiest setups and create more problems for themselves than any user ever could.
The secret is to give yourself as Elitez Hacker objectives things like “least maintenance time required” or “maximum computing power lowest energy consumption” (or it’s companion “silent yet powerful”).
Maybe “I’m fed up with the constant need for tweaking and the jet-plane-like quality of my heater-that-does-computing-on-the-side” is the real mid-life crisis of techies.
