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Comment by CaptainBern | Hacker News Reader

You could get older server hardware pretty cheap, and just run everything on a single physical machine, no?

For example, I picked up about 96 GB of DDR3 ECC ram for around 75 euros. A quick check on ebay, and the same amount of DDR4 is selling for at least _twice_ as much. I imagine it's pretty economical to buy this older hardware and just assemble a single beefy server, instead of buying multiple physical machines.

The added benefit is that this older hardware doesn't end up in a landfill, and even though older CPUs generally consume more power than their current gen equivalent, I reckon a single machine would consume about the same, or less, than multiple NUCs (I have no source to back that up though, it's just my assumption).

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Server hardware is designed to run in server environments, not home environments. Maybe if you had a basement or something, but the noise on those fans is going to drive you nuts. Off the shelf home desktop hardware is better, but amazingly inconsistent. The NUC platform isn’t a bad way to go if you have the cash.

Sure, but desktop hardware is also more likely to fail quicker as they're not designed to be used like servers. So there's a trade off.

A closet or the garage also works. I ran a couple of Dell 1U's in a closet for years, you could barely hear them thru the (fullsize, non-sliding) door

You're absolutely correct about the noise. Those 1U servers sound like a jet taking off pretty much the entire time they run. However, there's plenty of motherboards that are ATX (or E-ATX), so they fit in regular cases with little to no modifications. (Though, I just keep mine in my attic)

I agree the NUC is a great platform, but if you could spend less cash and get more bang for your buck, and perhaps have the added benefit of having a platform with ECC memory (not sure if the NUC supports ECC, I'm assuming it doesn't), then I think the latter is what most people would go for (or well, at least what I would go for :p).

We're also talking about home _servers_, so it doesn't seem that odd to me to use actual server hardware. The homelab[0] subreddit has a bunch of folks running actual server hardware for example.

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/

Or drive your family nuts, who will take you with them.

I had plans to build a noise isolated data closet in the basement (tied into the furnace air return) but I never ended up with the right sort of basement.

I use Dell/HP/Lenovo workstations that are off lease for this very purpose. Dual CPU, large RAM capacity, and quiet.

He wants the fun homelab not savings. His particular NUCs are ~$600 a piece, the nas was a few $k as well. Definitely you can get more compute on a single node but I think you'd be missing the point.

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