Get an older Mac mini. Been my file server for 5 years now.
Ask HN: Always on low power home server
91–100 of 139 posts
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#92Lots of old laptops out there for cheap if not free. Many of them are quiet and low power with the added bonus of having a built in UPS.
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#93I'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…
what sort of usb storage? I've looked at a few common flash drives and none of them support trim, so I'm not sure how the drive would know that the space isn't occupied
Normal SATA SSD + usb2Sata adapter?
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#94HP t620 PLUS. Ignore what the manufacturer says, it'll run 32GB RAM. I have a USB3 card in mine for more hard drives. ESXi with 5 VMs running all the time. Power consumption is like 6-12W for the base unit, plus whatever your drives and cards add.
Or use a Pi4 with USB disks.
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#95I’ve been running a pair of BeagelBone Black SBCs for this for years. The one I just retired to replace with the current model had been running nearly continuously since 2014. (Powered down to move — twice — and for power outages here and there.) It's anecdotal, but my experience so far is that the onboard eMMC seems faster and is less corruption-prone than SD cards.
My BBB has been going 24/7 as my Pihole for almost 1 year now. The only thing I have to manage is the Pihole logs because of the 2GB eMMC of my older version.
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#96If Open Hardware is something you care about, you can have a look to the different SBCs from Olimex, a Bulgarian company ( https://www.olimex.com/ ). They care about having the SoC they use being mainline supported in the Linux kernel. For example here : https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/Home-Server/open-s... I have been thinking of buying one with their LiPo battery pack to have nice shutdowns in case of pow…
I recently bought one to experiment with. It was trivial to setup and install.
My only surprise was that it didn't have pihole bundled. Here's what I've got:
$ cat /etc/debian_version
10.8
$ uname -a
Linux freedombox 4.19.0-14-armmp-lpae #1 SMP Debian 4.19.171-2 (2021-01-30) armv7l GNU/Linux
$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0 179:0 0 29.7G 0 disk
|-mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 128M 0 part /boot
`-mmcblk0p2 179:2 0 29.6G 0 part /
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 480M 0 480M 0% /dev
tmpfs 100M 11M 90M 11% /run
/dev/mmcblk0p2 30G 3.0G 27G 11% /
tmpfs 500M 0 500M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 500M 0 500M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p2 30G 3.0G 27G 11% /.snapshots
/dev/mmcblk0p1 124M 58M 60M 50% /boot
tmpfs 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user/10000
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#97For the price of RPi (or less!) you can buy a second-hand thin client which will have much more robust storage options and easy expandability. Some recommendations: HP T520/T620, Fujitsu Futro S520/S720, Wyse Dx0Q https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t520/ https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/Futro/s520/ https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/d/dx0q/
I rushed to comments just to make sure parky towers was there. That is a great website.
Also on the same spirit, the motherboard+cpu for processors like J4105 or J1900 often are found for less than a raspberry. Even better if used.
Lastly, worst case of maximum cost-benefit, you can try powering on a notebook replacement motherboard (which usually comes with RAM and CPU soldered). Here is a video using an old Thinkpad replacement board: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2vrRZqDy74
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
MicroSD cards tend to have much worse durability and IOPS than common USB sticks, and especially, say, an M.2 SSD to USB adapter.
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#99I'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…
Folks, the OP was asking for alternatives to Raspberry Pi, but everyone keeps saying just use Raspberry Pi with a USB hard drive or get some obscure second hand hardware.
I think the best alternative, while staying in the SBC realm, is a RockPro64 by Pine64. These boards have PCI-e slots and very cheap SATA & NVMe attachments. That way you get full performance from your SSD, versus a USB connection. And the boards have a huge number of community supported OS builds available. They are simple to install in a few clicks, with the official Pine64 installer.
The RockPro64 is highly underrated in my opinion. Especially when you consider the flexibility, available attachments & accessories, and wide range of use cases and OS options. A brand new board with 4GB RAM, power supply, and SSD PCI-e interface will run you only around $100 before shipping. Check them out. I have had one for a couple years and I'm super happy with it!
Boards: https://pine64.com/product-category/rockpro64/?v=0446c16e2e6...
Accessories: https://pine64.com/product-category/rockpro64-accessories/?v...
Re: Ask HN: Always on low power home server
#100I use a Raspberry Pi as a low-power website server and as a UPS controller. It has a heavy-duty heat-sink without a fan and runs consistently at around 39 degrees. Its power source is the UPS that it controls.
But I specifically used a slightly-slower high-endurance micro-USB card to prevent overuse wearing-out of the card. [I also use these same cards in my dash-cam.]
The cards I use are made by Sandisk, but no doubt other companies make them too. The ones I have are white, probably to distinguish them from 'normal' cards.
While I haven't had any problems at all in using these cards, their slightly slower speed makes them look like a 'fail' using the raspberry pi testing app.