New blog post: https://blog.mei-home.net/posts/s3-perf-and-future-hw/
I finally figured out why some of my S3 operations were so slow.
And I'm musing a bit about future hardware directions for the Homelab.
Anybody want to share their experience with Tiny/Mini/Micro PCs, especially when it comes to noise and power consumption? And perhaps extendability? Especially NICs?
@mmeier
I will read the blog later, but let me talk about the mini.
I recently acquired 3 Lenovo Tiny. They make zero noise, and have one PCI slot that I will use for a 2.5Gbe, plus one wifi card slot that I will convert to NVMe, and one regular NVMe. Lots of expansion (for me).
I used to have two HP SFF. They made some noise. Not bad, but it was perceptible, while the Lenovo Tiny is basically not at all. They had 3 PCI slots, but I could never fit a GPU in the case.
My suggestion: if you don't need lots of disks or extra boards, get a Tiny/Mini, not an SFF.
@badnetmask @zrail Wait, you guys clean your machines?! 😁
Thank you both for the comments. I had actually used SFF and Tiny/Mini/Micro synonymously and wasn't aware that that's two different things. Thanks especially for the 2.5Gbe/PCIe slot, that was exactly why I was wondering about expandability.
One more question which came to my mind: Do those tiny/mini/micro boxes have bespoke fans, or could they be (easily) replaced with e.g. a nice Noctua?
@mmeier @badnetmask the fan in my mini is proprietary and it took me a couple buy/return cycles to get the right one. The fans in the SFF are generally more available.
I wouldn't swap a Noctua into a mini anyway, I suspect their static pressure is just too high for it.
@badnetmask @mmeier @homelab I have two HP EliteDesk Mini and a Dell OptiPlex Micro, all running Proxmox headless.
most of these so-called "1-liter" PCs ship with CPUs in the 35-watt range, though you can get 65-watt ones which will be louder if you make them work hard.
I don't know about AMD yet, but with Intel CPUs it's possible in Linux to tell it how much power it can use for short & long periods, so if you want to limit noise and power consumption, that's at least possible. not sure about BSD.
as far as expandability, Dell tends to skimp on NVMe slots. HP EliteDesk Mini and ProDesk Mini often have 2. I like to put an Optane stick in one NVMe slot and use it for swap and partitions like /var/log.
HP also has a lot of little option daughterboards, such that you can add a NIC or a high-speed USB port with PD in (and then get a USB NIC with PD in and power your PC thru it).
you can also get cards for the m.2 wifi slot which accept a tiny NVMe drive, or add a couple SATA ports, or add a NIC (which you then have to mod the case to add).
be aware that if you get a DDR4 #1LPC, you are limited to 64GB of memory.
@surfhosting Thanks a lot, especially for the notes on the Dell expansion boards.
The possibility to fit a NIC is the most important for me, so I can upgrade them when I do my network upgrade.
@mmeier HP, but yeah. (I wouldn't be surprised if Dell has something similar, I just haven't dug into it as much as my Dell is my least capable system and I use a USB-PD 'decoy' to power it instead of a PD-capable expansion board like on the HP systems)
I'm not sure how fast of a NIC you can get for the various slot generations, but I do know USB NICs have more overhead in terms of host CPU usage, if you can bring yourself to use one ;)
Michael
Mauricio Teixeira🐧
Pete Keen
selfhosting.couchsurfing