Ask HN: Always on low power home server • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#31

Post by dewey » Sun, Feb 28, 2021, 1:11 PM UTC

mettamage wrote: post #30

For some Europeans: fly to US, buy Mac Mini with M1 chip for $699. For some other Europeans: go to country with lax tax policy, fly to US, buy Mac Mini with M1 chip for $699. You'd be set back by about 579 euro. In my country, the Mac Mini is 799 euro. So the difference is 220 euro. So if you wanted to visit the US, then it might be worth it. The tricky part: figuring out how to do this legally. It's probably not pos…

Seems a lot easier to just pay the taxes than to fly around the world in a pandemic?

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#32

Post by JerwuQu » Sun, Feb 28, 2021, 1:12 PM UTC

I run Alpine Linux in Diskless Mode on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. Diskless means it loads the OS from SD-card into RAM on boot and then runs from there, preventing wear. I use USB for writable storage only for the (few) applications I run that require it. It suffices as a basic NAS and consumes very little power.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#33

Post by jsilence » Sun, Feb 28, 2021, 1:13 PM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #28

davnicwil wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool, would like to set up something similar myself! > to increase available blocks for wear leveling If you have the time, would you mind expanding on what this means? It sounds something like the pi would automatically fail over to new parts of the usb storage as old parts wear out due to too many reads/writes -- is that correct? Was the 1/4 capacity chosen for a specific reason?

The USB storage firmware itself will do this. ¼ was chosen to give a lot of space for this wear levelling to occur; wear levelling can't use occupied space, so it'd need to move data around a lot if the drive was close to full, which would increase wear.

Wouldn't this also work with a large enough MicroSD?

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#34

Post by jsilence » Sun, Feb 28, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #7

I'd again recommend a Raspberry Pi (ideally 4 with 4GB+ RAM), but with some modifications. - You can choose an high endurance MicroSD card to maximize its life. - You can delegate big file storage to something external (a HDD or SSD w/USB 3.0 connection). If you want something small, SanDisk Extreme Pro USB stick is a real SSD with USB-SATA bridge inside and 400MB/sec throughput. - Armbian writes logs and swap to RAM…

There is Armbian for the RaspberryPi now? Last time I checked RasPi was explicitly excluded because of non free Broadcom binary blob.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#35

Post by jonpo » Sun, Feb 28, 2021, 1:17 PM UTC

Try a Nuc 11 with an Akasa turing.. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16191/akasa-turing-fanless-ca... slap in 64GB ram and a 1TB SSD Run proxmox .. boom silent homelab that sits in the living room behind the TV ..

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#36

Post by bayindirh » Sun, Feb 28, 2021, 1:17 PM UTC

jsilence wrote: post #34

bayindirh wrote: post #7

I'd again recommend a Raspberry Pi (ideally 4 with 4GB+ RAM), but with some modifications. - You can choose an high endurance MicroSD card to maximize its life. - You can delegate big file storage to something external (a HDD or SSD w/USB 3.0 connection). If you want something small, SanDisk Extreme Pro USB stick is a real SSD with USB-SATA bridge inside and 400MB/sec throughput. - Armbian writes logs and swap to RAM…

There is Armbian for the RaspberryPi now? Last time I checked RasPi was explicitly excluded because of non free Broadcom binary blob.

Oh, my mind is playing games to me. You're right. I misremember it. Sorry.

Will update my comment.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#37

Post by als0 » Sun, Feb 28, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

Intel NUCs or similar clones Lenovo ThinkCenter Tiny or HP ProDesk Mini are good candidates. They are not worth their retail price but are often sold very cheaply on second-hand markets like eBay. I have one. Very quiet things and can handle a dense amount of workloads. Memory, storage and mini PCI devices are all upgradeable.

These things consume around less than 8W at idle, so obviously they are not as low power as the RPi. But if you need to handle a lot of beefy services on the same machine then the power-performance ratio of these machines may be more attractive.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#38

Post by Fice » Sun, Feb 28, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

I use a mini-ITX board (GA-C1007UN), which has an embedded Celeron CPU and two GbE ports. It serves me for almost five years now as a home server, router and Wi-Fi access point. The downside is that it requires an ATX power supply and is not completely silent.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#39

Post by macNchz » Sun, Feb 28, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

I used a Raspberry Pi for this for a long time and did fry a couple of SD cards along the way. A few years ago, the last time the SD card died, I decided that instead of buying a USB SSD for it I’d get a used Lenovo Thinkcentre “Tiny”, which has been great.

They are readily available from corporate IT liquidators on eBay. Mine was $100 and came with a Core i5, 250GB SSD, 8GB of memory. I’ve read about people swapping Xeons into them as well. It uses more power than a Pi but is still basically silent. Overall I’ve found it to be perfect for the things you’re talking about.

Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server

#40

Post by Sebb767 » Sun, Feb 28, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

I happened to be in the same situation recently :) I'll list everything, in case other people find it useful.

If you want to go really low power, ARM is probably the best choice. The smallest choices are something like a Raspberry Pi, Ordroid C4, RockPi and the likes. Some of these have SATA-Ports, so if your only concern is SD-card corruption, this is the way to go.

For more power on ARM, the current options get expensive fast, unfortunately. There are some servers coming out, but 5 digits is probably not what you're looking for ;) The mid-range is pretty empty as well (compared to x86), but you can go with a NVidia Jetson or HoneyComb LX2 [0].

When you need to have virtualisation, run proprietary software (or Kodi+Netflix, as I have found out) or run PFSense/OPNSense, you probably want to go x86. Luckily, the x86 space is not as small. The low end is filled by J1900-SoCs [1], which you can get quite cheap. The Odroid H2/+[2] is pretty powerful as well and is comparable to an RPi in size. I can highly recommend these low power boards - they consume 10-20W max, can be run with a MiniPSU [3] and yet they can provide good speed and double-digit amounts of RAM. Also, they're very cheap and even cheaper second-hand. Only drawback is that Ryzen embedded SoCs seem to be in their infancy.

If you need even more compute power, you can go for a Mini-PC. These are available in small form factors on AliExpress [4], but you can also build them yourself quite easily by choosing a MicroATX/MiniATX board and some low-power CPU, combined with a passive heat sink and a small case. These usually come with more ports than the option above, but, depending on what you put in there, the power use might go up quite a bit. It's the least expensive way to get ECC, though. Intel NUCs are also an option, but these don't come cheap.

The last option is a small desktop PC. You can easily cool it passively in a large enough case, just take a large heat sink and a low-ish TDP CPU. Modern CPUs might idle at 20-40W, so it's not that bad. Try to get a very efficient PSU and a low-feature mainboard and you should be fine. The advantages of these builds are probably the best $/performance ratio and the most variation and extendability, but at the price of comparatively high power draw.

A honorable mention goes to the Epyc Embedded [5]/Xeon D [6] SoCs. These are quite nice, providing an abundance of enterprise ports (like SFP+) and ECC in a small form factor, but they're also priced for enterprise - so, unless money is not a problem, these are probably not an option.

[0] https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/h... [1] i.e. https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-J1900N-D3V-rev-1x [2] https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h2/start [3] https://www.ebay.de/itm/Mini-ITX-PSU-120W-DC-DC-Rev-2-bringt... (for example, not this specific offer) [4] https://www.aliexpress.com/category/70803003/mini-pc.html [5] https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E... [6] https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x11sdv-16c-tp8f-revi...