this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
1233 points (98.8% liked)

Memes

45619 readers
1844 users here now

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Does nobody else cobble together home servers with spare parts any more?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Spare parts don't run on 5-10 watts.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Spare parts can also do a heck of a lot more.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Everything is a trade-off ;-)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just download some more RAM already

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

My Goodness Why Didn't I Think of That!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I just imagine the power in three zip codes flickering (I kid I kid)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Random ebay junk is both better and cheaper than a raspberry pi

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)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I also want something with a multi-TB hi-speed drive that can handle a dozen different services.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

There are external drives the pi can access via USB, 480mbps. Should be fast enough for most LAN uses.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I cobbled my home server together with twine, a 14u server rack and some used poweredge servers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Well yeah. I do, out of necessity. I can't justify buying a pi yet. Someday I hope to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.