111–120 of 261 posts
Does anyone have recommendation for a mini PC with min 2 sata ports for two 3.5” HDDs, min 2 NVMe for ssd storage, one ssd or eMMC for OS, and 64GB of RAM, with the ability to power up the HDDs from the miniPC (not requiring external power source)? The HDDs are installed in a case externally. An external PCIe slot to support those 4 mixed drives via an adapter would work too. I tend to avoid usb HDDs enclosures, sinc…
Counterpoints: - Specs are too limited for my needs (storage capacity for backup / home NAS purposes; compute power for local AI work; throughput for local high speed network traffic shaping; etc) - can't upgrade over time (right now I'm averaging 15 years for my boxes, with incremental upgrades like storage, RAID adapters, memory, CPU etc, and I don't need to go through the days-long hassle of reformatting, reinstal…
I'm thinking of a beefy mini-PC + USB-C 8+ hard drive enclosure. I feel like I rarely upgraded anything except GPU and storage. And GPU's are not needed for a server. Enclosure means easy storage upgrade and I can always reattach the enclosure to another machine quickly. Might even install OS on the enclosure, then the whole setup will survive compute upgrades until the predominant architecture changes.
Having a couple of pre-built nas' from QNAP or Synology can go a long way to getting one's feet wet to learn what they offer that we sometimes learn the hard way about.
I still haven’t been able to find something that fits the bill - the hardest part to get information on is noise, since most people don’t seem to care about it or just play with headphones. I understand that such a product is hard to build, with a direct tension between power, space and noise.
What has never been clear to me is whether such a market even exists and I’d tend to say no, even if the market seems to be changing rapidly with amd apus ( we’re far from a 5080 , but it seems to be a step in the right direction ).
I have a homelab which is a zimaboard, a dumb netgear switch, and six mini-pc's (5560U/16GB/500GB). The zimaboard runs pfsense & an nginx reverse proxy, then all six of the mini-pcs run proxmox. 4 mini-pcs run k8s clusters (talos) and the other two run home services and selected one-offs (home-assistant, plex, bookstack, build-tools, gitea, origin servers for a subset of projects). It was a lot easier to set up than…
This does sound like a massive PITA. what is the point of it? What are you using it for?
> Put that in perspective with high-end machines with hardware concerned with performance and not power draw, that can easily idle at 100W. I've been trying to optimize my desktop's power consumption. At the beginning of the year I put the kill-a-watt on it and was shocked to see it was using 115W idle! I got it to 90W pretty quickly with some minor Linux tuning but was still pretty unhappy to see so much idle load.…
So either buy one of these new very fancy minipc (ms-01 etc) or DIY. End up landing on 2nd hand AM4 hardware but with 2nd hand enterprise SSDs and optanes. And that's been perfect. Competent at virtualization (5700X) and the hybrid enterprise ssd/optane array will take endless punishment.
That said not abandoning the minipcs & SBCs. 3 raspberries for HA k8s controlplane, low power minipc to keep home assistant and adguard live 24/7 etc.
Counterpoints: - Specs are too limited for my needs (storage capacity for backup / home NAS purposes; compute power for local AI work; throughput for local high speed network traffic shaping; etc) - can't upgrade over time (right now I'm averaging 15 years for my boxes, with incremental upgrades like storage, RAID adapters, memory, CPU etc, and I don't need to go through the days-long hassle of reformatting, reinstal…
I want one for gaming , that is silent, provides high end graphics, and takes little space ( Mac mini or studio size ideally ). I’m essentially willing to pay extra for a specced up gaming console. I still haven’t been able to find something that fits the bill - the hardest part to get information on is noise, since most people don’t seem to care about it or just play with headphones. I understand that such a product…
I want one for gaming , that is silent, provides high end graphics, and takes little space ( Mac mini or studio size ideally ). I’m essentially willing to pay extra for a specced up gaming console. I still haven’t been able to find something that fits the bill - the hardest part to get information on is noise, since most people don’t seem to care about it or just play with headphones. I understand that such a product…
I agree and already got two minipcs I selfhost a lot of stuff now. I just now realized it is basically the future Gabe Newell predicted and wanted to make with Steam Machines [1], but he was wrong by targeting gamers and a little too early (perhaps?). Maybe they will succeed precisely because of this revolution. I got soooo tired setting up a gaming system for parties on my projector. There are so many various proble…
Self-hosting has become orders of magnitude easier and simpler over the past 5-10 years.