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Comment by barumi | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

> But when I showed off my build on /r/homelab, reddit’s homelab subcommunity, they mocked me as a filthy casual because I used consumer parts. The cool kids used enterprise gear.

It should be noted that you can purchase used enterprise servers for peanuts.

I'm looking right now at an ad for a used Dell PowerEdge R730xd SFF 24x which packs two Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3 and 64GB of RAM which is on the market for about $1200, and it was literally the first search result.

A Dell PowerEdge R720 8x 2U LFF with the same CPU/RAM/HDD combo is on the market for less than $1000.

A Dell Precision T7610 workstation, with dual Xeon ES-2670 and 64GB of RAM, can be purchased by around $600.

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So reading through the article, he really didn't know what he was doing and should probably have asked /r/homelab for assistance before he just tore ass into building this thing.

He got mocked for building using consumer gear (he didn't, the poster, while standoffish, did bring up good points). Then he goes and buys parts piecemeal from eBay and builds again...

I bought a Dell PowerEdge R610 w/ 48 GB of RAM, two quad-core CPUs, and two 146 GB 10K RPM drives for $229 on eBay about 3 or 4 years ago. That system still functions as my development server for testing today, and will likely have enough oomph to do the job for another year or two.

At which point I'll buy a Dell PowerEdge R730 with 192 GB of RAM, dual 8-to-12 core CPUs, and a few SSDs for $500 or so... maybe even cheaper.

I asked a lot of questions from IT friends of mine who work in enterprise before I purchase any enterprise-grade gear, and I also watch a lot of Level1Techs (since Wendell likes to repurpose enterprise stuff for home use as well) to get new ideas for cool projects.

You go halfass into any domain without even bothering to ask the journeymen and experts and then post about it on their own board / subreddit, yeah, you probably will get made fun of.

That's true in the US, but when I looked to buy in the past in London, and a different time in Tel-Aviv (and did a quick look for comparison in other places), it seemed like everything local is being sold at ~50-75% original price, which -- factoring efficiency, CPU advances, and wear -- is more expensive than buying new.

It's probably a cultural thing, but it seems that most enterprises prefer to offload at these cheap prices to resellers who like to charge high prices (except, somehow, in the US). Also - both in London and in Tel-Aviv - I had never known any business who bought second hand servers or workstation. I'm sure these businesses exist - but every IT person I've ever talked to only buys new.

The US 2nd hand equipment economy makes sense to me, but no other place in the world does.

When I was living in London, there was heaps of good 2nd hand stuff available on Ebay at really cheap prices. eg Supermicro, Mellanox

Now that I'm in Australia... the availability of things is much less. Ugh. :(

While those prices seem pretty good for first world countries, many of the people in my country don't make more than $1000 per month, so it'd still be a substantial investment.

There's nothing wrong with consumer hardware for homelabs (except for ECC RAM sometimes not being supported), for example, i use Athlon 200GE's for mine because of the 35W TDP and however much RAM i can buy, with some SeaGate HDDs for storage.

That's definitely enough to run some virtualization, though nowadays i mostly use Docker Swarm (while K3S would also run with little issues on that hardware).

Of course, there are also the option of looking at alternatives to expensive cloud vendors: not everyone needs AWS, GCP or Azure, which are better suited for businesses. Some alternatives that come to mind are:

- Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/

- Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

- Vultr: https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing

- DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/

Personally, i use an even cheaper host, called Time4VPS, which is in Lithuania: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (disclaimer: affiliate link), which i've been using for a few years. Of course, using something like BackupPC https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/ to make incremental backups with rsync is also useful in the case of all of these services.

> While those prices seem pretty good for first world countries, many of the people in my country don't make more than $1000 per month, so it'd still be a substantial investment.

That price is just the benchmark for that specific combination of CPUs and RAM.

There are plenty of used servers in the market that are being sold for less than 200€.

yes you can. But don't forget to estimate your power bill beforehand :)

While that's true, the build in the article itself also has dual E5-2680 cpus's. So the parent poster is picking pretty close like-for-like hardware.

The used workstations make a lot of sense for low noise and great price. Focus on RAM. Homelabs may not need a lot of CPU as things are generally idle, but admins always find a reason to run more VMs and eat up all the RAM they have. I went with the HP Z820 and 96GB RAM for under $1000.

I came here to make a similar comment.

The best server I have ever purchased or built is the 710 I bought 4 years ago for $400-500. It's been rock solid, unlike every machine I have ever built from scratch that always had weird issues (most not occurring with any regularity, but annoying enough when they occured).

even if one can save a few pennies by building a server like this themselves, I'd always strongly recommend they go with a similarly specced off lease server.

Yeah but at what (power) cost? I'm sitting on a J5005 based home built NAS (ITX system with 6x 3.5" drive slots) and a 6500T uSFF PC as a hypervisor. I don't need the CPU core count of teh author, sure, but I'm running at maybe 150w under full load and about 50w idle between both systems.

My whole stack is, on average, less costly to run than 1x Xeon V3 CPU standalone. But power cost is also a priority for me vs more cores.

I agree, just buy a used enterprise server for those in the US. I bought a 128gb ram, 8 cpu/16 cores server for $1k, 2 or 3 years ago.

Honestly, depending on your use case you can go as low as a r710 for about $150-$200. Check your local classifieds website!

Only ones I can find on the classifieds site here in Norway are listed at several hundred dollars. $600+

In general I think it is difficult to come by cheap computers here in Norway.

I remember back when I was member of a student union for people interested in computers and programming, former members or friends of current members would sometimes donate decommissioned servers to our student union. That was great. And it also makes me wonder why I don’t see any reasonably priced (or even free?) servers on the classifieds site. I suppose in most cases the decommissioned servers are just sent to recycling stations. Or employees get to take them or something.

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