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Comment by blackfawn | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Power draw and often noise on enterprise equipment is ridiculous in a home setting. I try to stick to the small form factor (SFF) or ultra-small form factor (USFF) computers whenever I can, which is what the author is using. I used to use Raspberry Pi boards for some things but always ran into problems w/ microSD cards dying, even with log2ram and buying industrial cards. I haven't had a single issue after switching to tiny x64 machines w/ real SSDs in them.

I picked up a HP managed switch that I thought I might use but it draws more power than the ThinkCentre M93p Tiny computers do and it's actively cooled w/ super noisy 1U fan(s) so I'm going to ditch it.

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Yeah - I skipped rPi because back when I started replacing stuff ARM still had some gotcha's with stuff that hadn't been ported. I do use the rPi's for the 3d printers though.

I've found the TP Link stuff to be good for home switches. cheap, quiet, and basically fully featured/managed. Stuff like SNMP, VLAN/Mac Lan, port mirroring/monitoring, etc. Also SSH and web interfaces... I have 2-3 currently, 1 per room feeding back to the PowerConnects (NOISY) and haven't had a single issue in 3-5 years of use :-)

One of the coolest additions to my home lab recently was an Orange Pi 5 plus/pro - 8 core ARM 64-bit cpu and 32GB of RAM all with awesome power usage and zero noise, plus an up to date kernel. I skipped the rpi as well a while back but these newer boards are worth lookin at! :)

Oh nice! - I'll have to take a look

Thanks!

The Omada line makes pretty decent AP’s too. A step above ubiquiti in terms of reliability but also dead simple. I’d have gone ruckus if I could have but the mailman stole my $200 eBay R550 score and I didn’t feel like shelling out $500 for one.

Which x64 machines have you been using? I'm looking for a successor to PC Engines APUs

I've been sticking w/ very compact units, mainly ThinkCentre M series "Tiny" and Dell OptiPlex "Micro" form factor, which are both practically identical in size. Both use a laptop power supply. You can get current versions for many hundreds of dollars or generation(s) old ones for as cheap as $30 USD. My most recent ones were older 3rd & 4th gen i5 & i7 CPUs but they still blow current Raspberry Pi, etc. out of the water, have M.2 for network, etc. & SATA for storage. A Dell I have that's a generation newer than these adds NVMe too. It's hard finding these small PCs that have multiple Ethernet but I just added a gigabit Ethernet M.2 card to the one.

I was also looking for a successor to the PC Engines APUs and came across https://teklager.se/en/ that lists some possible alternatives that you might find interesting.

Personally I was looking to build a router so I ended up buying a fanless N100 based mini PC from Aliexpress (e.g.: search term is "N100 firewall appliance") and have been very satisfied with it so far (Proxmox homelab with OPNsense running as a VM).

I love the Odroid H series [0]. cheap, quiet and only like 4w idle draw

0) https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3

On paper, these look promising, no direct experience. Also on Amazon US/CA.

$170, N100, 16GB LPDDR5, dual 2.5GbE, https://aoostar.com/products/aoostar-n-box-pro-intel-n100-mi...

$210, N100, dual 3.5" SATA, M.2 NVME, dual 2.5GbE, https://aoostar.com/products/aoostar-r1-2bay-nas-intel-n100-...

$250, Ryzen 5700U, https://aoostar.com/products/aoostar-cyber-amd-ryzen-7-5700u...

The N100 is the current thing. It is in a large variety of form factors with a variety of available connectivity options.

N100 sips power while performing as well as a 60w quad core Skylake.

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