I use an HP ProLiant Microserver with four drives in a ZFS RAIDZ array and an SSD for the OS. For software, I mostly run it in Docker using a very small container orchestration program I wrote:
Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?
21–30 of 100 posts
Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?
#22I have an Asrock Deskmini. It's a nice half-way between a NUC and something more beefy like a mITX system. I wanted a more powerful desktop-class processor, which is good for transcoding when using jellyfin for example, and has options for more storage than a NUC.
It tops out at a higher power, but idle is something like 15 watts, so still low enough to forget about.
Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?
#23Rackmount NAS, 3 Intel NUCs with a rackmount adapter. Small rack in a closet.
Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?
#24I’ve been running an Asustor NAS ever since I wanted to self host. Recently switched to a newer Asustor model. I’m running Homeassistant, pihole and a few node based websites on it. Also used it for a while as a media server in my house combined with a Kodi pi streamer behind my TV. But found that becoming a bit old fashioned.
Their systems were relatively cheap and perform well. Community is a bit smaller as opposed to the Synology one though.
Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?
#25I have a couple of desktops with decent CPU, memory and GPU and 4x Intel NUCs that I run Proxmox on to manage VMs. I generally run a Kubernetes cluster on the VMs.
Depending on your use case, maybe just run a couple $5 machines on DigitalOcean?
Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?
#26You could consider an M2 Mac Mini. Can be had for ~$800 CAD, low power consumption, small footprint, and of course a decently powerful CPU.
The Mac Mini is a nice computer, but macOS mostly sucks as a server OS and linux options are limited. After you consider the base specs, $800 gives you a poor offering compared to other SFX PCs, moreso once you add the markup on any spec upgrades.
The CPU and associated power usage is nice, but I don't think it will pay for itself in that regard.
Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?
#27CPUs are various Haswell-era Intel Xeons. RAM is, in all cases, 32GB (4x8GB) UDIMM DDR3 UDIMM. There are always multiple disks, some in ZRAID10 configuration. SSDs are purchased new, while spinning disks are all refurbished enterprise disks.
Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?
#288x3TB btrfs RAID1, Intel i5, 1050Ti in an Elite 120 case. The original build was in 2017, and it’s been slow upgrades since.
It stays in the TV cabinet in our living room.
Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?
#29Synology NAS, plus a raspberry pi running Pihole. Not very exciting.
Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?
#30My parents' old PC. Circa 2011 motherboard with 2x 4TB spinning rust drives via SATA and an SSD plugged into a USB port to boot TrueNAS. 16GB RAM iirc. Only aftermarket part is a 1gig ethernet PCIe card. For basic file storage, pihole+wireguard termination inside VMS, and occasional one to two user streaming, it does the job fine. My biggest gripe is power usage; it probably makes fiscal sense to do a build from scratch just to bring down the power consumption.