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Comment by treesciencebot | Hacker News Reader

Something that miss is, unless you need tons of IO (in the form of SAS/SATA storage, or old generation PCIe cards), avoiding these huge, noisy and power hungry servers are a lot simpler than people may think. Mini/Micro form factor OEM PCs on the same price point generally come with much newer generation of hardware (instead of a 3rd gen i7, you might get a 8th gen i5) and overall performance is so much better. It’s also so much easier to host and maintain (just plug it near your ISP modem, and forget about it).

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I've got an old Skylake HP elite SFF machine. Without modification it can hold two 3.5in drives and a single 2.5in drive. Also with great cooling design (cowling to direct heat from the cou straight out of the back) and an efficient PSU (80 plus platinum), it makes a great value always-on machine.

>and forget about it

This is exactly what I didn't want when I was 16. I did have a server too, but in the HP ML form factor (less noise than the pizza boxes). Also, ECC is kind of important, and a real HW raid is a nice learning expierience.

But if you _do_ need a whole bunch of SATA disks, it's hard to beat a bunch of R720XDs.

I have a small fleet of them and they're actually not that noisy or power-hungry if you 1) disable cpus 2) undervolt remaining cpus 3) write your own fan controller off of raw ipmi byte sequences

By far one of the best cost/pb mass storage solutions. I have a bunch of NUCs and SBCs too, but they're definitely suited for different purposes.

One of these days I'll buy a surplus Isilon cluster or two and truly achieve bulk storage apotheosis. Cbf fighting Ceph in my spare time as well.

I was looking at running OpnSense for my router and almost used my old Skylake computer. Instead I bought a $100 fanless Intel N100 micro computer that sips 7w and has about the same performance. The electricity savings will pay for itself. And the i5-6600k wasn't even that power hungry.

You might be surprised about the old Skylake. If it's using a solid state drive and any unnecessary fans/peripherals are disabled, it's probably only going to use 10w or so at near idle (as a firewall would be with that chip.)

Even if it uses 17W on average, the 10W difference would be $14/year at $.16/kWh electricity. Unless your electricity is significantly more expensive, it probably will never pay for itself over its useful life.

Had an Intel Motherboard + Atom CPU combo as a File Server once, but eventually had to upgrade it because Atom chips really suck. Eventually want to a Skylake Pentium, which performs much better.

Absolutely. I think that's the practical solution I'll do when I move out. Until then, it's definitely not nearly as fun though!!

When you do head to uni, maybe see if there's a nearby place which can co-locate your servers?

Stuff like this, though "near the uni" would make it easier to access if/when the hardware needs a bit of adjustment. :)

* https://www.hetzner.com/colocation

Note that co-location pricing can be all over the place (from low to incredibly high), so don't get discouraged too early.

This website might be useful too, as it seems to show data centers in various countries.

* https://www.datacentermap.com/switzerland/

Might be useful for putting together a list of places to investigate. :)

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