Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

71–80 of 100 posts

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

#73
post #51

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 c…

I got the i5 8gb version for $62 off of eBay for Home Assistant after seeing rpi4 prices. Very cool system in such a compact size at an unbeatable price.

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

#75
My NAS is in an ATX mid case (Antec 900 that I've had for 15+ years) with a used xeon e3, 32 GB of RAM, and 40TB of storage in a zfs mirror. Running TrueNAS with MinIO, Postgres, and MariaDB in containers.

Compute is more sleek. I have an AsRock DeskMeet with an i5 12400, GTX 1650 super, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB m.2. Running around 25 containers and not even having to work hard. The GPU handles transcodes for both Plex and Jellyfin, and most volumes are NFS shares from the NAS.

This iteration of hardware has been running since early this year and it's very performant and quiet. I took out all the fans but the 200mm exhaust in the NAS and can only hear the DeskMeet when the CPU fan really kicks up.

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

#76
My homelab has

1) a NAS/Server with 10700 + 12 TB HDD x 15 forming a ZFS, with 128GB of RAM.

2) A pair of machine learning servers, each of them with a threadripper 3955wx, 256GB RAM and two 4090s

3) A more powerful machine learning server, with a threadripper 5975wx, 512GB RAM and two 4090s.

All of them run NixOS. They are mainly used to serve a bunch of services: hydra/nix binary cache, shiori, grafana/prometheus, paperless, syncthing, filerun, assistant etc. And also training jobs all the time.

I would highly recommend NixOS to run on your servers for the services.

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

#77
post #76

My homelab has 1) a NAS/Server with 10700 + 12 TB HDD x 15 forming a ZFS, with 128GB of RAM. 2) A pair of machine learning servers, each of them with a threadripper 3955wx, 256GB RAM and two 4090s 3) A more powerful machine learning server, with a threadripper 5975wx, 512GB RAM and two 4090s. All of them run NixOS. They are mainly used to serve a bunch of services: hydra/nix binary cache, shiori, grafana/prometheus,…

Holy smokes, I'd hate to be on the receiving end of that power bill, though I'd love to have the kind of workload that justified that setup.

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

#78

You 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.

You can easily run Linux VMs on it though.

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

#79
I have: 1. An old i3 running TrueNAS after I decided my QNAP TS-503 was too old and shonky to be able to run Plex; 2. An ex-govt i5-6500 with 32GB RAM for miscellaneous development activities; 3. An RPi 4 that runs prometheus/grafana for monitoring; 4. A Khadas Vim3 that currently runs some crypto-related analytics, but is mostly for fun/experimentation; 5. A 2015 Macbook (12") that's been gutted all the way down to the logic board, with a combination power/ethernet dongle hanging off it, running Linux as a headless machine for more mucking around/non-serious stuff; 6. A work-issued Macbook Pro (M1 Pro); 7. A Windows desktop with a Ryzen 5 2600, 32GB RAM, a 2Tb nvme and a 1660Ti for gaming; 8. Aforementioned QNAP TS-503 gathering dust.

If I'd change anything, I'd turn the Khadas into a media PC and plug it into my TV and retire my broken old AppleTV (some older generation that doesn't allow installing apps), I'll inherit my wife's 12" Macbook and add wire it up the same way as the other one, and then get rid of the i5 and bring the power consumption down a bit (the Core M-5 in the 12" Macbook is surprisingly powerful, and with the I/O on the Macbook, it'd beat the i5 hands-down, aside from the RAM limitations). At some point I'd love to build a small cluster of ARM boards when they step up in capability a bit (and when I can find some reasonably priced ones that can support 32GB RAM or more), and then any dev stuff I do can run in minikube or something similar. I'd like to play around with RISC-V at some point too.

For your purposes... I'd recommend a thin formfactor with a decent CPU, 64GB RAM and as much storage as you can stuff into it, then run TrueNAS.

Post reply on HN