Hosting your own services. Preferably at home and on low-power or shared hardware.
Also check out:
Give it POE support and a rack-mountable enclosure and the homelab crowd would love this.
“The white PCB is for prototypes only, and the final PCB will be black.” – personally think the white PCB is a better look overall
Interesting, but somewhat overpriced and half assed. You can get a used tiny or micro business unit, complete with psp and case for that price. With more bang under the hood than this, and not a raspi-style cables-everywhere spaghetti solution like this.
What would you recommend? Where can one find those businesses units? I looked on ebay but was only able to find normal mini computers, no energy efficient SBC ARM boards.
Maybe this provides a good starter read: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/
There are more in detail later articles, also dealing withore modern units, and the prices are from 2020, where lockdown and other factors spiked a big demand.
I'm more into beginner's server units, and I've sourced a Supermicro X10 based 1u server for EUR 75 including shipping on one ebay night.
Patience is the key, and probably best set yourself an upper limit price wise.
Thanks, but I’m using a refurbished Lenovo Tiny Thinkcentre as server for selfhosting already. I was just hoping to find a more energy efficient ARM SBC board like previously mentioned.
€75 is pretty impressive, the lowest I’ve seen was €95 w/o shippinng and w/o CPU, RAM, PSU.
Ah sry, I misread your post. I've done the math on the energy consumption of the small fleet of ARM SBCs I used to have for server things, and came up with a surprisingly high number, up to 80W with all peripherals. This, plus the cable mess (although I tried to minimalize that by putting them in gutted rack router cases and such) made me consolidate all services into two X10 based servers. One is backup/playground and usually off, one is the prod unit. They idle around 20-30W and are tucked away in a rack.
So, for my use case one x86 unit with Proxmox is more energy efficient than going the ARM way. Added comfort gain is standard cases, cabling, PSP and IPMI.
On the negative side, one has to watch out not getting totally sucked into the homelabbing rabbit hole ;-)
Globally, as others have already mentioned, ebay would be your best bet.
Here's a recent post with some more useful links and ressources: https://lemmy.world/post/4724459
Search for "refurbished thin client" or something like that. The popular ones are usually from HP.
@qaz
You pretty much just look under your feet usually. Globally they get dumped in bulk on ebay, local platforms for p2p sales of used stuff also have them in most of the world.
@Cobrachicken