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Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

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Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#41

TrueNAS Scale might be worth looking at. https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/ for a desktop or shelf sized unit, those are actually quite nice, and repairable with off the shelf hardware.

Disclaimer: I have a Mini XL+, but it's primarily storage on my office 10gbe network.

Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C3758 @ 2.20GHz 127.9GiB ECC RAM 8x WD in raidz2 1 SSD slot is a time machine pool for backing up my laptop on the network.

Scale would provide far more home server options than core. But all in all, the community is awesome, you're somewhat supporting open source and ZFS. And the big one for me is I can repair it, or swap out ALL the hardware if I want to upgrade.

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#44
post #33

Home server is house in an Inter-tech 4u4416, a crappy case, don't buy. A supermicro motherboard with a 1.6 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2603v3 CPU. 32 GiB ECC memory. Operating system on a 256 GiB samsung SSD. Main storage on 8x12 TiB HGST HUH721212ALE604 in zfs raidz2 Secondary (backup) storage on 4x5 TiB HGST HDN726050ALE614, zfs zraid2 (only some things are backed up to this). Storage controllers are just plain sata control…

u4416 you say?

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%90%96

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#45
My recommendation would be using an old laptop you have laying around, or picking up a used Lenovo T series laptop for 300-400USD on ebay. Try to find a CPU with 10000+ score on cpubenchmark.net, and 16GB+ memory. Plug in whatever storage you want with USB.

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#46

I 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.

I use mine as a desktop, TV, and router/access point. Apart from dhcp/DNS no services consistently hosted. It goes down every day or so.

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#47
I switched to a trio of N95 mini PCs (two from Beelink, one I can't remember but was bought from Geekbuying. These plus some SSD upgrades (from 256->512 GB) and RAM (8->16GB) allows me to have a pretty cheap, very low power real "HA" setup. I run Rancher and k3s on it.

The N100 is slightly more expensive but also has an even lower TDP.

What's nice is that for software that can use an Intel iGPU for hardware video transcoding, these are more than powerful enough to do so and yet draw significantly less power than a full fat GPU. Unless you want to run an LLM or something like Stable Diffusion...

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#48
post #32

Skull Canyon NUC (Skylake, the gamery one with the literal skull on it). Synology NAS with a bunch of 16TiB drives. Runs basically everything I want including a gitlab instance (which is externally accessible: https://git.drk.sc )

I second Synology NAS. Although the UX of running Nextcloud in docker was awful, I defaulted to using everything Synology has to offer instead of setting up OSS apps (Synology Photos instead of Nextcloud/ Photoprism etc). I run a few small side projects with cloudflared. Low power consumption, RAM can be upgraded, storage is almost infinite... Beware the CPU. If you plan to host something serious, it will probably become a bottleneck.

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#49
I've been keen on a new TrueNAS Scale build very similar to the one showcased on LTT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO6DMWHK_HA

That's a full-custom build with a used AMD EPYC, Asrock Rack ROMED8-2T, and a boatload of HDDs, which fit great in a Fractal Design 7, which seems to match your desire for not-a-rack.

Re: Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?

#50
I recently replaced an old, power hungry 2U server with a laptop.

I wanted a NUC, but as it turns out a used laptop on Ebay could fetch the same specs (i7-1185G7, 16gb) for less than half the price of the equivalent NUC (without an SSD or memory).

An added bonus is you get a UPS and KVM included!

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