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Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

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Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#11

Love my synology, I’ve been using it for 12 years now. I will upgrade at some point to latest 4bay version

Second Synology. Mine has purred along for years, low power (30 watts 4 hdds at high load) and easy to manage with containers.

Everything is fast thanks to an SSD and caching m.2. I max out 1gbit over SMB.

Snapshots have saved potential days/weeks worth of troubleshooting in total and is a must have. Cold backups are easy with Hyper Backup.

I couldn't ask for more.

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#12
I'm rocking an older Intel NUC8i5BEK sitting next to a Synology 2-bay NAS. I don't have heavy requirements on performance, I just needed something reliable and quiet, low power usage is a plus. It's been pretty solid. For a while I ran ESXi on it, then I decided to switch to KVM (that was a mistake, trying to make the networking sane was damn near impossible), and now I've condensed everything down to just working on a single OS instance so it runs Ubuntu on bare metal.

I probably should have stuck with ESXi. Running Home Assistant as HAOS has some conveniences that may be worthwhile depending on how much like you to tinker. But it also runs totally fine in a Docker container and that has it's own upsides.

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#14
Recently upgraded and have similar space constraints; I've shoved an i5-13500, 1xM2 NVME SSD, 2x2.5" SSDs, 6x3.5" HDDs into a Fractal Design Node 304, with a Silverstone ECS-07 replacing my old LSI HBA.

~700GB of cache/ container volumes on the 2.5"s as a mergerfs pool, ~38T across the HDDs in mergerfs+snapraid.

Noise and heat are kept at a meaningfully low level, and the case blends in appropriately with the living room. All the normal home-cloud workloads, along with k8s homelab stuff (so I can computer janitor in my free time).

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#15
I built a small business around this idea (particularly your last sentence about it evolving quickly), so I can’t not promote https://KubeSail.com and our hardware at https://pibox.io

That said, I use an old workstation as my home router and server. It’s worth the power bills in saved subscription cost alone. Much more relevant is how much of my time I spend on it!

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#17
HP Proliant 1U standing vertically inside a water heater cabinet! It is running Proxmox. The 10-15 services for my LAN isn't creating enough heat that I can hear it, except if the dryer is also on and it is a hot day and Plex is being used...

There's also a enterprise HP switch where I disabled the fan and it reports "temperature normal" even though it is in the same cabinet. Fibre to OPNsense in the living room.

It doesn't have to be complicated or pretty.

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#18
Just upgraded the CPU in my old haswell Core-i3 mediacenter box to a Xeon E3-1271v3 (cause they are now $20 on ebay). It was an i3 because i5s and i7s do not include ECC support. The i3 did and the new xeon does. Supermicro X10SLM-F mobo, 32GB ECC ram, 7x 14TB drives in a software RAID6, intel SLC 128GB SDD for rootfs, debian stable, 2.5Gbit NIC

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#19
3x NUCS, two 5th gen i3's and a 5th gen i5 all with 16 GB of ram. Running a proxmox cluster across them hosting a couple vms as container hosts to run all my services including grafana, prometheus, plex, tinytinyrss, calibre server, homeassistant, a reverse proxy and nextcloud. And then really whatever I'm playing with at the time, kubernetes, rocks, etc.

I also have a dell micro with a 6th gen i7 and 16GB ram I use as my primary windows machine, but previously it was hosting all the aforementioned services by itself.

I'd go with some kind of mini PC and an external drive or two, or direct attached storage rather than a synology

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#20
3x Intel NUCs with i7 + 16GB mem, 2x Raspberry Pi 4 8GBs, 1x Synology NAS w/ 4x10TB drives

The NUCs run my HA kubernetes cluster and all the apps I run out of my home. The Pis are primarily for playing around. The NAS is my general NFS server storage which mostly gets used by my k8s cluster.

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