Ask HN: Home lab scale-up ARM box < $1.5k USD?

14 points·throwiforgtnlzy··6 comments

I'm looking to convey into my home lab an ARM box more single-image capable than my RPi 4B POE + SSDs cluster. Already have OrangePi and not looking at RPi 5.

What good SBCs or used enterprise ARM servers exist that aren't running antique/unsupported Linux/*BSD distros?

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Have you looked into an M1 or M2 Mac Mini? They are excellent performance for the money and you could either use macOS (it’s a genuine certified BSD-flavored UNIX) or Asahi Linux. They also appear to support OpenBSD and NetBSD, although I’m not sure how well.

https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-altrad8ud-1l2t-revi...

This board + 64c CPU bundle is 1.5k on Newegg. With PCIe4 you're in a different league IO-wise vs any Pi-style SBC.

Good find. Thanks much.

Edit: This Czech site has 128C backorder offers for about the same price. I wished I had still access to enterprise pricing. ): https://anafrashop.com

Would appreciate an update if you do find a vendor with global shipping, I'm looking around myself.

You may find some of these interesting. I believe they all run ESXi arm edition so you can easily launch vms from any aarch64 uefi iso

https://www.ipi.wiki/products/com-hpc-ampere-altra

https://shop.solid-run.com/product/SRLX216S00D00GE064H09CH/

Nvidia Jetson AGX ( wow the prices went insane on these, got mine for 1k years ago )

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-dev-kit-2023

I didn't look in details, but I saw that BananaPi has a 32GB RAM version now. Less than $350 on amazon.

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