Time for a new dev machine – just get a NUC? | Hacker News Reader

Time for a new dev machine – just get a NUC?

6 pointsintrasight8 comments

Historically, I have purchased individual components to build my development machines. I like having control over the details, and there really are that many details so it's not overwhelming. I buy quality and keep my machines for about 4 years. My plan was to build a mini-tower with a Skylake Xeon and 32GB of ECC memory. Such a system with top-tier components would run about $1500 (no video card – I don't play games). Then the Skylake NUC came out. They cost about $350. Adding two SSDs brings it up to about $800. That's about half the price. Two things I'd be giving up are a) option to add a graphics card, and b) ECC memory. The ECC is perhaps the bigger issue for me. Crashes cost time and money. My current desktop does not have ECC – and it does crash every couple of months. I leave my computer on all the time – how would a NUC fare with that? I'm curious to hear the opinions of others who are embarking on a new dev build.

While the NUC is a fine machine (I own the previous gen) consider getting a workstation (I am on my second one in 8 years - https://h41360.www4.hp.com/pps-offers.php?prod_cat=workstati...) for below advantages -

1) You get ECC memory and can opt for a Xeon CPU which multi tasks way better than Core versions in my experience. (NUC is space constrained so less thermal headroom thus slower sustained performance and the need for a noisier fan.)

2) Substantially better build quality - for added benefit my tower z230 sounds much quieter than the NUC which I have to keep on the desk.

3)The prices are not that higher than the fully loaded NUC for the features you get - for example $787 for 256GB SSD, 16GB ECC RAM, 1TB disk latest Xeon E3 and GPU built in.

4) I am not sure if you want RAID for data protection but sounds like you are careful - so the workstation I mentioned above gets you 5 disk bays - one SSD and 4xRAID is great to have. Not an option with the NUC.

5) It comes with a Windows license unlike the NUC and you get a Enterprise grade warranty for a year which you can extend for very reasonable price.

I am constantly delighted by my Z230 - it is fast, reliable and allows me to multi task quite heavily without any slowdowns.

Thanks for the info, but like I said, I like to pick all my own hardware which rules out purchasing a vendor-configured workstation.

You mentioned NUC though - which doesn't exactly allow you to pick all your own hardware any more than a bare bones workstation. Anyway good luck with the search - as you experienced assembling your own comes with its own challenges - finding the most stable combination of parts etc.

You're right. I shouldn't limit myself to NUCs if I want something "standard".

I don't have any information or opinion regarding the choice of cpu but I doubt your crashes are due to not having ECC, unless the machine has a bad memory module. It's more likely to be a software problem, maybe driver related. Failing that it could be bad hardware.

My current laptop (running Linux), which certainly doesn't have ECC, hasn't had a system crash since I've had it, which is well over a year. In my experience system crashes with properly working software and hardware should be exceedingly rare, even without ECC. Granted none of my machines have had 32 GB of RAM, my current laptop has 8 GB, but that's only a factor of 4 difference and I'm pretty sure my accumulated experience with various machines adds up to far less than 1 unexplained system crash per month per 32 GB.

I suspect that you are right about the crashes. The quality of modern memory is probably why ECC has become uncommon.

I had one running with Ubuntu, and after around two/three weeks the Nuc didn't want to boot, no reaction when pressing the on button, but lan led was on. Then I got another one and the same thing happened after a month or so. Afterwards I've decided not use a Nuc again.

But in our customer support everybody has a Nuc and they're running fine, I was the only one with these problems.

Probably I'm just unlucky.

I have a 2nd gen NUC and it works well. But it's underpowered for my purposes.

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