Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Upgrading my home server

earth.li

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 70 posts

Re: Upgrading my home server

#41

Post by cameronbrown »

effie wrote: post #18

For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.

Some people aren't going for cheap and quiet though. People who buy rack mounted home servers are doing it as a hobby unto itself.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#42

Post by neilv »

fulafel wrote: post #23
effie wrote: post #18

For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.

For both cheap and easy, pick up a used ThinkPad. Comes witj built in console too, normally a feature only found in high end blade racks!

And a built-in UPS.

But be careful of cooling, if you want to run it with the lid closed.

Also, if you want to run RAID mirroring, a used ThinkPad might only have one 2.5" drive bay, and no M.2. But if it has an UltraBay of some kind, you can buy a SATA adapter.

(Personally, the last 24/7 data (not compute) server I built for home, I considered a ThinkPad, and I also previously had IBM 1U and beige box Linux servers, but decided to go with a mini-ITX Atom board designed for fanless use, and set up RAID with fairly cool-running and homogeneous drives. It worked very well, and silently. There was one drive failure (possibly because I stacked them in a bracket in a small ITX case rather found a way to space them out for better cooling), but it kept running for years more after I replaced the drive, and eventually I sold it.)

Re: Upgrading my home server

#43

Post by herf »

bpye wrote: post #4

I've been running a gen 8 microserver with a 4C/8T Xeon for the past few years. The servers got cheap like I still haven't found anything with a comparably convenient form factor and the remote management is pretty useful too. Can still saturate my 1G LAN, more or less, with Samba. Other than the power draw, which I'm sure would improve with a more modern CPU, I haven't really felt the need to upgrade.

Moving right now to the HPE ML110 gen10 because I wanted 8 disks that were quiet. (Previously was using a microserver gen8 with an external enclosure.)

Re: Upgrading my home server

#44

Post by trm42 »

effie wrote: post #18

For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.

Agreed, my take on the same subject although from 2 years old, but I would make the same decisions still (though maybe switch to AMD Ryzen mobo and CPU;-)

The Fractal Design Node 304 box is awesome. It's quiet, can host 6-7 disks although it doesn't have hotswap design. In practice opening the box and switching disks is not that common problem and the design makes the HDDs quieter than hotswap bays.

https://medium.com/@trm42/building-backup-server-for-photogr...

Re: Upgrading my home server

#45

Post by Scoundreller »

vbezhenar wrote: post #9
bpye wrote: post #4

I've been running a gen 8 microserver with a 4C/8T Xeon for the past few years. The servers got cheap like I still haven't found anything with a comparably convenient form factor and the remote management is pretty useful too. Can still saturate my 1G LAN, more or less, with Samba. Other than the power draw, which I'm sure would improve with a more modern CPU, I haven't really felt the need to upgrade.

Same here. Another annoyance for me is that its fans are a bit loud unless I'm running it in fake raid mode which requires proprietary Linux drivers. But I've found nothing comparable.

If you’re okay with less airflow, you may be able to run the fans at 10V if you have a -5 and +5 available. Or just run a few diodes on the 12V supply to the fan to get 0.6x voltage drops.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#46

Post by Scoundreller »

Havoc wrote: post #40

I'm gonna stick to just using my previous gen laptop as I upgrade. Need fresh ones due to GPU so the old one is perfectly fine for server duty still. Stick a couple USB3 docks on there & good to go But...now I'm unsure what to do with the old old one...

Part it out? I do that with my previous gen MacBook Air and usually get a good return.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#47

Post by joyjoyjoy »

effie wrote: post #18

For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.

"Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it."

Honestly, I can not hear my rackmount server. In fact, I was not sure that the fans are used or are even working. I just had to open it recently and just because of some dust on the front fan I know that the fans are actually running sometimes.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#48

Post by barrkel »

I have my home server in the attic, a 4U with a bunch of drives in it running ZFS. 4G RAM, Q6600 Intel chip - I've been running the same hardware for years. The fan sound is unnoticeable - it's on the other side of the insulation, and it's approximately located above my desk in my home office.

It gets hot in the attic in summer, but I've had no failures thus far (no hardware errors from overheating, no drives died). Dust filters on the fans need cleaning off every year or so.

I'm due to upgrade it, 4G ceiling is starting to get tight when using more recent software.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#49

Post by zzzcpan »

cyphar wrote: post #30
effie wrote: post #18

For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it. Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.

> Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it. I definitely wouldn't have my rackmount server in my bedroom, but instead I have it in a separate office/study room. If you get decent fans (like Noctua) it's definitely not that loud, though the main problem is it's hard to find a cheap powe…

There is nothing wrong with cutting wires and soldering and for fans you don't even need any soldiering. Although if you were to solder, speed of all those brushless dc fans can be easily controlled via voltage. Meaning that dc-dc step down converter (costs less than $1) is usually enough to make a fan quiet or just putting it on a 5v rail instead of 12v, although that might make it too slow to be usable. Also PC fans vendors suck, they overprice fans like crazy, sort of similar how expensive audio equipment is overpriced for audiophiles. Just use fans from a decent non-PC fans vendor, like Sunon.

I wouldn't use rackmount cases at home though, they are not designed for low noise at all and fans are not the only problem. Noise from a bunch of vibrating HDDs is not as easily fixable as from fans, not in a rackmount case.

Re: Upgrading my home server

#50

Post by leetbulb »

amelius wrote: post #6

What is the best and cheapest way to make a home server available to the internet, using a standard "home use" ISP contract? Can you give it a domain name? How do you deal with the asymmetrical upload/download speeds of most home connections?

CloudFlare Argo Tunnel
Post reply on HN