this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Does nobody else cobble together home servers with spare parts any more?
Spare parts don't run on 5-10 watts.
Spare parts can also do a heck of a lot more.
Everything is a trade-off ;-)
yep i do, amd phenom x6 with 8gb of ram is still rocking!
but not for long, i have too many services for the ram and it swaps too much.
Just download some more RAM already
My Goodness Why Didn't I Think of That!
A cheap used office computer with a good CPU and decent RAM can far exceed the power of a Pi. That's been my strategy. I just Frankenstein it a bit with leftover parts from my gaming computer and load it up with disks.
Ditto. My current server has the MoBo + CPU of a friend's old all-in-one, the case of an old HTPC, RAM from a trashcan, and big fat platters.
There's good deals on lenovo m900s or dell optiplex that are great for this. New enough to have low idle wattage and decent performance for VMs and containers, and old enough that they're cheap.
I do this. Random ebay junk is both better and cheaper than a raspberry pi. When I first started doing home server stuff, I had the option between an Athlon XP and a raspberry pi and the Athlon XP delivered better performance (I tried both).
A PC drawing 150 watts will burn through $225+ in electricity a year. The raspberry pi maxes out at like 6 watts.
RPi is the best performance to operating cost you are going to find if you don't need more juice for high intensity stuff (transcoding, etc)
Mine is a server I got for free because the person I got it from didn't want it anymore as he was going to something more power efficient
Mine's running dual Xeons with 192GB of RAM
Edit: I really do need to upgrade it to something less power hungry though
I just imagine the power in three zip codes flickering (I kid I kid)
hawt
I’ve done it a ton in the past, I’ll do it again in the future, but having a essentially plug and play tiny little box that sips juice and still does what I need while being silent… is rather nice
I also want something with a multi-TB hi-speed drive that can handle a dozen different services.
There are external drives the pi can access via USB, 480mbps. Should be fast enough for most LAN uses.
Just me lol
Well yeah. I do, out of necessity. I can't justify buying a pi yet. Someday I hope to.
I bought a couple Raspis before they even came out, and they're handy for certain applications, but just can't really stand up to the task for whole home server needs.
I have a RPi1B that runs Pihole just fine, and I have a RPi4 that runs a bunch of services fine (plug in a SSD, don't use a SD card).
But if you're hoping to do a photo server or run a media centre... nah. Rpis are very power efficient, but for media you really need something that's gonna suck more power.
The Raspberry Pi: When "a computer, any computer" will do. I have so many of them in service bolted to the backs of televisions or monitors as digital signage.
If you don't need the electronic side of the RPi, you might be happier with some old thinclient PC that offices sometimes get rid of for cheap.
I cobbled my home server together with twine, a 14u server rack and some used poweredge servers.