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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I appreciate the suggestion but these are not N100 PCs. I'm looking for something in the $200-300 range. Those are just complete overkill for my purposes.
I do like the idea of using USB drives for storage, though...
I wholeheartedly don't.
Not even for the OS?
Nope.
Just waiting for failure in my experience.
Though it could be cheaper to have a backup or 2, all identical bits stored on them and swap them out as(/if) they fail
I have a few servers that have been booting from USB for years. Two of my old freenas boxes (now just hosting backups of data from unraid), have been booting off the same USB sticks for almost 10 years now. In addition to the freenas boxes I use internal USB drives on Unraid, ProxMox, and ESXi hosts (had to try them all).
Its a risk, but having a cloned USB as a backup can mitigate it a bit.
So just... Waiting for failure then? ;)
As for me, give me an HA cluster and I don't care if I need to reinstall. I don't need to worry about an additional point of failure (USB drive) that is almost always going to fail before any of the other hardware.
It's part of why absolutely nothing important ever runs on a raspberry Pi for me though, SD cards are no better.
Now as for my favorite example of why I don't do it in production? Someone doing a bit of minor maintenance in the rack, accidentally pressed against a box running esxi off USB (on a gen 6 HP for rough timeline), broke the drive.
The backup? Well, it had corrupted, and wouldn't boot.
Oh man, that would suck. I do not ever use an external USB port for that exact reason! Aside from a few desktops and laptops around the house all my equipment has an internal USB port for the purpose of a boot drive (I always assumed that was the reason).
All production stuff needs backups. Personally I try to keep boot device backups saved to another device as an image so if one goes down, I can clone it to a USB real quick and restore the blink to the lights; ideally I should also keep them off site, but I don't like to use cloud providers (tin foil hat and all).
Wasn't my rack, thankfully, so it was someone else's problem.
But anyway even internal you're just leaning on when the thumb drive will fail vs an SSD and the onboard controller. So give me that SSD and HA any day of the week, but that's my comfort level. I even do it at home with my proxmox clusters.
You can get those machines second hand for the price range you specified.
About the USB storage, just be careful about what OS you're running. It is very important that you to manually configure the system not to write logs and other crap to the flash storage OR... you can pick something like Armbian (yes it does have a x86 version) that is already tweaked to run on SD card and other kinds of flash.
If cheap USB flash isn't performant enough maybe a USB SSD of some kind (there are some that are NVMe) will most likely work you. Anyway don't forget that USB may disconnect when pushed around and it can become a issue.
I frankly wouldn't run anything over USB because it is painful but it is an option. Maybe make a solid case for your mini computer and the hard drive and bolt everything down into place.
I'm currently running 3.5 inch HDDs via usb3.0 to sata. Working ok so far (time will tell) but I do need a plug socket for every one of them
Maybe but they also presumably consume much more power?
If you pick one of those machines with a "T" CPU you won't even notice them. They'll downscale on idle to probably around the same power the N100 would. The real difference is that they'll use more power if you demand more resources but even that that point do you really care about a few watts?
Before anyone loses their minds, imagine you get the i3-8300T model that will peak at 25W, that's about 0.375$ a month to run the thing assuming a constant 100% load that you'll never have.
Even the most cheap ass cloud service out there will be more expensive than running that unit at 100% load. People like to freak about power consumption yet it's not their small mini PC that ruins their power bill for sure.
Not sure how you came to that conclusion, but even in places with very cheap electricity, it does not even come close to your claimed $0.375 per month. At 25 W you would obviously consume about 18 kWh per month. Assuming $0.10/kWh you'd pay $1.80/month. In Europe you can easily pay $0.30/kWh, so you would already pay more than $5 per month or $60 per year.
Just used cpubenchmark.net.
Well, what they are stating is obviously wrong then. No need to use some website for that anyway, since it is so easy to calculate yourself.
Okay, you're into something, they're considering 8 hours / day at 0.25$ per kWh2 and 25% CPU by default. Still if we tweak that into reasonable numbers, or even consider your 60$/year it will still be cheaper than a cloud service... either way those machines won't run at 25W on idle, more like 7W.
Sure, cloud services can get quite expensive and I agree that using used hardware for self-hosting - if it is at least somewhat modern - is a viable option.
I just wanted to make sure, the actual cost is understood. I find it rather helpful to calculate this for my systems in use. Sometimes it can actually make sense to replace some old hardware with newer stuff, simply because of the electricity cost savings of using newer hardware.
Yes and we usually see that with very old server grade hardware vs new-ish consumer hardware. Once the price difference is around 100$ or so, we're talking about years before break-even and it may not make much sense.
Power doesn't cost the same everywhere
Yes, I'm in Europe with this Ukrainian/Russian mess whatever you're paying I can assure you I'm paying more than most people reading this and you don't see me freaking out about a mini PC. Even if you multiply everything above by 4 (and that will certainly go over wtv someone is paying right now) you'll sill be talking about a very little money compared to everything else you're running in our houses.
While I agree 25W is not much, I pay around 1€ for 1W a year (Croatia) and I know there are countries that pay way more thn that. Still, we are talking about power that is close to SBC consumption, you cant go much lower. I think number of devices (drives etc) are more important than actual CPU idle power
Yes, or even the BIOS setup, some of those machines allow to disable CPU cores and un-used hardware.
No one is "freaking out" except you.
they consume 8-10W