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Comment by effie | Hacker News Reader

For those wanting a quiet home server for cheap, go for a well-ventilated tower PC, best with passive CPU cooler and a quiet case and power supply fan. You can put that box in a bedroom and almost never see it/hear it.

Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.

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For both cheap and easy, pick up a used ThinkPad. Comes witj built in console too, normally a feature only found in high end blade racks!

And a built-in UPS.

But be careful of cooling, if you want to run it with the lid closed.

Also, if you want to run RAID mirroring, a used ThinkPad might only have one 2.5" drive bay, and no M.2. But if it has an UltraBay of some kind, you can buy a SATA adapter.

(Personally, the last 24/7 data (not compute) server I built for home, I considered a ThinkPad, and I also previously had IBM 1U and beige box Linux servers, but decided to go with a mini-ITX Atom board designed for fanless use, and set up RAID with fairly cool-running and homogeneous drives. It worked very well, and silently. There was one drive failure (possibly because I stacked them in a bracket in a small ITX case rather found a way to space them out for better cooling), but it kept running for years more after I replaced the drive, and eventually I sold it.)

Re cooling, its often good to mount them on their side with cover partly open.

For a home server, you usually need backups i dependent of mirroring but not the availability optimization and associated operational complexity of raid-1.

The Supermicro 2U I used for a home server, sounded like a jet engine on take-off out of the box. But you'll find fan settings in the bios to experiment with and as long as the server's temps can handle it, you can slow the fans to almost imperceptible levels. And this is mid-2000s technology (SS-6025 and X7DB mboard). Today, I'd be looking at some of the small form-factor servers, like the Intel NUC.

Agreed, my take on the same subject although from 2 years old, but I would make the same decisions still (though maybe switch to AMD Ryzen mobo and CPU;-)

The Fractal Design Node 304 box is awesome. It's quiet, can host 6-7 disks although it doesn't have hotswap design. In practice opening the box and switching disks is not that common problem and the design makes the HDDs quieter than hotswap bays.

https://medium.com/@trm42/building-backup-server-for-photogr...

> Rackmount server in home people so often brag about on the Internet is a very loud and impractical way to run network services from home, unless you have separate room for it.

I definitely wouldn't have my rackmount server in my bedroom, but instead I have it in a separate office/study room.

If you get decent fans (like Noctua) it's definitely not that loud, though the main problem is it's hard to find a cheap power supply that has decent (or replaceable) fans for a 2U rack. You can replace the fans on PSUs by cutting wires and soldering but that's always felt like a bad idea to me.

There is nothing wrong with cutting wires and soldering and for fans you don't even need any soldiering. Although if you were to solder, speed of all those brushless dc fans can be easily controlled via voltage. Meaning that dc-dc step down converter (costs less than $1) is usually enough to make a fan quiet or just putting it on a 5v rail instead of 12v, although that might make it too slow to be usable. Also PC fans vendors suck, they overprice fans like crazy, sort of similar how expensive audio equipment is overpriced for audiophiles. Just use fans from a decent non-PC fans vendor, like Sunon.

I wouldn't use rackmount cases at home though, they are not designed for low noise at all and fans are not the only problem. Noise from a bunch of vibrating HDDs is not as easily fixable as from fans, not in a rackmount case.

Some people aren't going for cheap and quiet though. People who buy rack mounted home servers are doing it as a hobby unto itself.

Why not go for an RPi or mintbox? Both can be passively cooled.

And you can use an RPi to switch on a "real" server in case you need it.

I've been trying to justify that, but it's just too limited for what I want. I basically want to run ZFS, which is a bit RAM hungry, as well as some other processes. So, I basically want 4GB minimum, preferably 8. The latest RPi has 4GB RAM with me option to expand, so it might barely fit the bill for now. I'm not really a fan of the USB interface for driving hard drives, not to mention having to get separate power figured out, and the RPi 4 also runs a little hot.

So I have been looking at other options, like the Nano Pi m4 and the RockPro64, both of which have SATA expansion options. However, to get everything I'll need, it'll cost $100+ and only be a short term solution anyway.

So, I've decided to just get another stick of RAM for my old desktop (runs 4GB right now) and just eat the extra memory usage.

Perhaps check out up-squared systems. https://up-board.org/

There are pretty good pre-built current-gen passively-cooled pcs, for example Airtop 2/3 https://fit-iot.com/web/

I have my doubts over bedroom quiet if you have hard drives in it. Ssd unfortunately still too expensive for redundant home storage use.

Mine is in the kitchen for exactly that reason. No matter how quiet it is, any sort of constant noise like that of an hdd drives me nuts. But I fully agree normal desktop tower is the way to go. Enough space inside so it doesn't easily overheat and lots of room for expansion.

Using it for routing with DNS block list, media file server and off site backup.

One thing I can recommend after decades of fiddling around with home servers: If you don't need it for the high availability, don't use raid 1. Raid is not a backup. Use another drive, preferably larger, and run something like dirvish or Borg once a day or however often you see fit in your case.

I have a Fractal Design Define R5 case (https://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/define-ser...) in my living room at the side of my television where I sit a few feet away in a small apartment and can not hear it unless I put my head right next to it, then I can just about hear the case fans.

It's fitted with 4 x 4TB WD Reds, a stock AMD Ryzen 2600 cooler, Corsair RM850x PSU and the cheapest graphics card I could find with a HDMI out, the graphic card has a small fan. I also have a HBA card I modded adding a small Noctua fan as they are passively cooled and designed to go in rack mount cases where they have high airflow passing over them so get to hot in a desktop.

The case has rubber mountings for the hard drives and sound reducing material on the side panels.

I built it to be quiet but didn't go massively out my way or spend massively to make it quieter i.e. I choose a good case but have stock case fans, stock cpu cooler and choose a PSU where the fan only spins up under load which I'll never hit.

It's not to hard to build something that for all intent and purposes is silent as long as you don't pimp it out with the latest fastest graphic cards, have it maxed out 24/7, or go small.

I have the same case, similar PSU setup. My latest UPS makes more noise than the system it's protecting.

Meanwhile, the low-end atom box attached to the TV has extra fans on it And constantly makes noise. My excuse is that I built it about 8 years ago.

May be someone should be a sound proof case for a JBOD..

Disks suspended with cables? Box filled with sound absorption materials? Whatever it takes.

Or if that cost ~= cost of SSDs, just buy SSDs.

Me? I have a 12 TB SAS disk connected to the system with an easy to turn off switch so I power it up only when I need to backup something. Others times it stays unmounted and powered off. My whole digital footprint is only a TB....

You can solve HDD noise issue in a tower case DIY style by suspending HDDs in some rubberry material. There is plenty of space for that where CDROMs used to be put. Or buy a tower case that has anti vibration for HDDs already.

You are right, 3.5" disks can be loud, 2.5" drives or SSDs are better in that respect. Other option is to spin down / suspend the box after inactivity.

Loudest component will usually be the drives, otherwise something else is to loud.

I don't know that I've ever seen a rackmount server where the fans weren't by far the loudest part. Granted, I haven't bought a new server from the last few years, but manufacturers seem to have very little desire to reduce fan noise, and without that it's unlikely they'll be quieter than even a rack full of drives.

If you're using consumer gear in a rackmount form factor (which I'd recommend, given that AMD Ryzen and Threadripper support ECC and are really cheap compared to Xeons), then you can get nice Noctua fans which really help make the fans much more reasonable.

Right now the PSU fan is the loudest thing in my rack, but I think I'm going to cut and solder a much quieter fan in place.

Yes! My next server is definitely going to be a custom build, probably with Ryzen. I've gotten far too tired of the problems I've had with Enterprise hardware, and forced incompatibilities. It will probably still be a tower though, in order to get it as quiet as possible for my apartment.

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