cm0002A homelabber/sysadmin midlife crisis
dch82Meanwhile…
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.
Dell PowerEdge T410 Server Xeon [email protected] 64GB RAM, 2TB HDD + RAID | eBay
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Isn’t that a bit like buying an old truck instead of a year old Miata?
Those CPUs use so much juice when idling … sure, you dont get all them lanes or ECC, but a year old PC 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 …
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.
Sounds nice, but yes, uses quite a bit of power.
I should measure mine - I have a Ryzen 5900 (24t, 64MB … some 20k cinebench score) as the main, and a Core 12700 (16+4t, 12MB).
(And Intel gen 7 and 2 at my patents. All of them proxmoxed.)
Never ever managed to bottleneck anything on them, not really, but got them super cheap used.
Buying anything server/enterprise that powerful would cost me a lot of moneys.
The only reason that I have measured my server is that it has that feature built into the iDRAC. I have been thinking of buying an external power meter for years but have never bothered to do that.
Luckily I got my server for free from work. It was part of an old SAN so it came with 4 dual 16 Gbit fiber channel cards and 2 dual 10 gigabit ethernet cards. Before I took those out of the server it consumed around 150 watts at idle which is crazy.