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Comment by boring_twenties | Hacker News Reader

Buy a used server from Ebay that has lots of hot-swappable drive bays. Many can be had for $100-200 and work fine.

Your electricity usage footprint might outpace the savings that appear to be the case up front.

Separating your storage as an appliance/service (dedicated NAS with low power usage) is worth running a comparison on.

So much this. I think my energy bill for my single PC as mentioned elsewhere in this thread works out about $70 (equiv) a year.

When I had the full whack server rack it was pulling that a month and 99% of the time it was idle.

This might depend on where you live...my server pulls 180W average with 11 hard drives (10 reg, 1 SSD). That works out to ~$150/yr at my electricity rate of $0.0816/kwh.

Energy isn’t going to get cheaper and neither is the environmental impact of consuming lots of it.

Running a less efficient server or making a brand new server that consumes raw materials. Same can be said for a 10yr old Honda Civic versus a brand new Tesla. Either way is wasteful...just depends on your viewpoint.

Yeah which is why I do neither.

Once you add up multiple devices it can get out of hand.

The price/watt ratio is helpful to have something you set, forget and don't notice running in the background.

I did this also. An HP G8 DL380p with 12LFF spots was had for <$250 with plenty of RAM. Add Xpenology and it was like having a Synology NAS for about 1/5 the price. Currently I'm running 8x8TB in RAID6...something that would have required a ~$1200 machine from Synology (at least when I was looking to upgrade).

I would like to do this, but am worried about the noise. I've heard servers that sound like jet engines. Is anything I can look for to avoid that?

I would love to know, actually. Mine are all annoyingly loud, especially the HP. The worst part is that there is no operator control over the fan speed what so fucking ever, and it automatically goes up much more than necessary just because a PCI card has been added or some such (even an HP-branded PCI card).

You can probably do a lot better by building a custom one, but that is going to be a lot more expensive. I would love to hear from anyone with experience in this actually, as I'm kind of starting to get fed up with it.

Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago.

Another annoyance is that they will mostly come with some kind of hardware RAID card that doesn't passthrough raw disks. Often, a completely worthless one that must be replaced. Even if it's a less terrible one, it will require reflashing if you want to use it in JBOD mode (for ZFS or software RAID).

All that being said, considering that I paid $140 shipped for this HP server 3 years ago, I'm not sure how much I can complain. Setup was a pain in the ass, but once I got it done, it's been working mostly flawlessly since. The only ongoing pain points for me are the lack of USB3, and the fan noise. (I could add a USB3 PCI card, perhaps, but I'm sure that would increase the fan noise even more!)

> Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago.

Newer HPE servers with iLO 5 need any plain browser to access iLO, and for the remote console, give you the choice of HTML5, .Net, or Java. I have a Gen10 Microserver and the HTML5 console works flawlessly in Chrome.

I guess that's a pretty significant improvement, but I still don't understand why a server console needs a web browser at all? Why not just fire up a VNC server and call it a day?

Do some reasearch. The G8 DL380p I bought sounded fine until I didn't use the built in RAID and opted for software RAID due to the software I wanted to use. Not using that RAID caused the fans to run 100% all the time. I opted to hijack the fan voltage (which was harder than it should be for proprietary fan connectors/sensors) and manually crank down the speed to an acceptable temperature/noise ratio. More than I needed to do if I had just done some research first.

If you need 12-15 HDDs, Rosewill's 4U case (I have RSV-L4500) is good for bedroom because it supports 12cmfan. Fractal Design's Define 7 XL is recently released and also looks good if you prefer normal ATX case dimension rather than rackmount.

If you need just about 8 or fewer HDDs and don't need hotswap, there's many options like just normal ATX case.

If you need silence, Don't get a server case that supports 8cm fan only!

Avoid real servers. Intel NUC, and tiny pcs from lenovo, hp, dell etc are perfectly serviceable for this purpose.

AFAIK, none of those support ECC RAM, making them eminently unsuitable for serious storage.

ECC ram is definitely a consideration. I've appreciated having it when it was around.

The needs of each homelab can be different though. Some homelabs don't need to be that serious from a power/noise/energy cost perspective just to get ECC, unless there is an explicit benefit from it.

Making do without ECC can be perfectly possible for some or most portions of a homelab.

most of the synology units are not using ECC. should we avoid them?

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