you can attach a SSD to a RPI, but the USB interface will make it less fast than it could be
Ask HN: Always on low power home server
21–30 of 139 posts
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#22I've used a few cheap Chinese "mini PC" as found on Amazon. The model with an Atom quad core is fine for light uses (and with the built in dGPU can hardware encode with Plex, albeit not h265 10bit).
The current one I have is an Ace PC with a Pentium Quad Core - it does have a fan, but it hardly ever comes on, and it has 2.5" sata drive support in addition to the 120GB eMMC flash on board. I've got a 1TB 860 Evo in there and it's a fine lightweight server for file storage, plex, nextcloud and InfluxDB which is monitoring the various routers and computers on the network.
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#23I’m also interested! It would also be great if knowledgeable people comment on cheapest options. RPi options typically end up around $100. There once was the CHIP computer for $10 that included storage, wifi (but not ethernet), for example, but not anymore. Quantity has a quality of its own and all that...
Most routers have an OS and a hard drive. Can you take control of your router? Or, a good way to save on the overall cost, is to return the router rented to the provider, and have a router-computer.
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#24I left the RasPi behind for a 2nd hand Lenovo m93p tiny for about $100. (An alternative HW would be the Dell Optiplex 9020 micro).
You can upgrade the RAM on these and they use standard SSDs.
I'm booting the Proxmox VM environment and it's currently running a VM and a LXC container, with lots of future opportunities.
Proxmox allows you to reserve a vm's access to the USB ports, which comes in handy if you want to attach a Zigbee stick to a virtualized home automation server.
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#25I'd stick with a RasPi. There's a process to set a boot flag to allow booting from USB media. From there you can install Raspbian (or your other distro of choice) to any USB connected storage device. I've been using the same USB drive partitioned and formatted to 1/4th its capacity (to increase available blocks for wear leveling) for 5 straight years without any issues. https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardw…
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?
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#26rpi can now boot from ssd via usb. but i would recommend against using rpi.
cheap, used nuc or dell / hp mini pc would be better. the power usage difference is negligible
i have few NUCs at home (5) + few rpi (3) and while it works, the support for ARM is still bad.
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#27Check out reddit.com/r/homelab
I personally don't think fanless cuts it. I have an APU2 as router but don't try to use it for anything that needs CPU.
I have a Asus Ryzen PN50 as a container host for home services like media, shares, backups.
It's relatively low power, it's worth its price but it has a fan. So I keep this on a shelf in a closet out of the way.
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#28I'd stick with a RasPi. There's a process to set a boot flag to allow booting from USB media. From there you can install Raspbian (or your other distro of choice) to any USB connected storage device. I've been using the same USB drive partitioned and formatted to 1/4th its capacity (to increase available blocks for wear leveling) for 5 straight years without any issues. https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardw…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#29I'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…
> You can choose an high endurance MicroSD card to maximize its life. You can also use whatever cheap card just for bootup, then immediately change root to a `/` mounted from an SSD.
This sounds interesting. Any guides for how to use as for boot only and how to attach an SSD to a pi? What powers the ssd etc? The last pi I tried was a 3b
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#30For 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 possible where I live, but I'm sure some European countries are more relaxed with their import tax policies.