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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?

#51

Post by ja27 »

I have two in use:

Newest is a HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini, i7-6700T, 32GB RAM, 1TB M.2 SSD. I had the SSD, the machine was ~$100US on eBay, and came with 1 stick of 16GB RAM so a matching second was only ~$24. I think right now I could pick up the same for about $200 including the SSD. It runs Proxmox with a few VMs for Minecraft, dev work, a Windows desktop, etc. Really a pretty capable machine for light-ish duty. I can barely hear the fan most of the time and just 35W TDP.

Older is a Gigabyte Brix with a Celeron J4105, 8GB RAM, and an M.2 SATA SSD. It's primarily been my Plex server but hosts a couple Docker containers and a website. It has four external USB3 hard drives. They're getting pretty old but I sometimes see them pop up in usable configs for ~$100 on eBay. I normally never hear the fan (the hard drives are louder) and just 10W TDP.

I'm really considering getting another ultra small form factor like that HP, but with the 7th gen i7 so it has hardware support for encoding HEVC / H265.

I've also had an old i3 Thinkpad running until recently. Also nearly silent and bonus that it has it's own battery and display/keyboard when I need to debug something.

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

#52

Post by PuffinBlue »

3 x HP t630 thin clients. Each with upgraded RAM and SSDs.

Each run proxmox, clustered together. Very cheap, low power and surprisingly not terrible. No fans so quiet too.

These aren't going to be good for Plex though. But the rest they'll do just fine.

For plex you probably want something like a NAS (bought or self made), with a good GPU for hardware transcoding. Note that doesn't necessarily mean separate GPU, I think you might be able to use quicksync on most Intel CPUs now.

I have a dedicated TrueNAS Scale box with something like 48TB of raw SSD storage running Emby in the official apps. And the stuff to populate said SSD storage with media. Bit overkill really, but fun.

Also have another big 32 thread AMD machine for 'work' home labbing - i.e. learning, tinkering and breaking stuff. It's separate from my personal cluster for security and for reasons of the personal stuff being a bit more important to me that it runs, hence the cluster and failover.

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

#53

Post by jrey2112 »

QNAP TS-464-8G. Runs containers, media server, file system, Plex, DLNA and a hundred more things. The RAID aspect with some Seagate IronWolf drives helps me sleep better at night.

I had a 7 year old QNAP which eventually died. I was able to purchase this one and move my drives over after updating the internal software first. Nothing lost. I then one by one took out my 4TB drives and replaced with 16TB drives, then expanded the space. Everything "just worked".

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

#54

Post by Dachande663 »

An old AMD 2400G, low-power but I miss intel quick sync for Plex. A few 12TB drives. Running Unraid as the OS because it is a nice mid-point between running Proxmox for managing VMs/Docker and TrueNAS for the storage side. Ultimately, I just don’t want to worry about servers at home where possible.

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

#55

Post by t0mas88 »

A quite old Dell XPS 13 with the battery removed (there are youtube videos on how to do that). It's very quite, low power usage and much faster than something like a Raspberry Pi.

Only limitation is that it doesn't have ethernet ports, so I needed a USB 3 to ethernet adapter. But those exist in usb-hub form and work quite well.

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

#56

Post by cagey »

A repurposed HP Pavillion TP01-0066 Desktop w/Ryzen 3700X, 256GB NVME SSD and 32GB RAM, with 5x USB 3.0 HDD's attached for mass storage and onsite backup using dirvish[1] and rdfind[2]. It has a fan but is usually silent.

[1] https://dirvish.org/ [2] https://github.com/pauldreik/rdfind

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

#58

Post by chazeon »

A fleet of three ThinkCentre PCs, m920x2 and m720x1, they use 8th Gen Intel CPUs. These three run Windows 11, Arch Linux, and macOS. Homelab is running mostly on the Arch Linux one with Docker supplemented by the Windows 11 one running some longer time job because Windows only upgrades every few months.

I also have a FriendlyELEC, an arm box that is running OpenWRT as a router and also serves Ubiquiti's controller.

There is two part of software/hardware I should be retiring/moving; both are Homebridge, one on Raspberry Pi Zero W and one on another Windows PC Hyper-V Ubuntu, but I just don't have time to move them yet. The Raspberry Pi Zero is especially annoying because it is so underpowered that it feels painful to wait for anything to upgrade.

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

#60

Post by disambiguation »

Homelabbing was my covid hobby. 2 Years ago I splurged on a r720xd and it's been a beast of a NAS. However, I too live in an apartment with a partner that isn't keen on the sight, heat, noise, and cost of electricity it produces, so it stays off most of the time. But I have a lot of personal data I've been hoarding for years (decades?) so I'm happy to have it safe, accessible, and local, even if mostly cold.

My always-on-device is some old PC parts (i7, 32g ram) running unraid on 2 ssd's (256g in parity) and docker services. For example this where Jellyfin will run while mounting assets remotely from the 720.

Finally, I have a brocade switch and a protectli box laying around that I've been saving for a rainy day to setup opnSense and 10G networking.

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