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Sysadmin here. Agreed. 1 or 2U servers for home use is fairly ridiculous. In fact, its kinda ridiculous for some business use now. We're probably only a few years away from a mainstream and popular form-factor that's a fraction of the size, with tiny SSDs instead of giant spinning drives and power-sipping x86 or ARM chips. Imagine something the size of a stack of 4 or 5 ipads replacing the typical 19" racked server.

For small and perhaps even medium business, this could be a good fit. The 19" rack really is something from a past era. Soon people will look at it the same way I look at old mainframes and minicomputers.

As far as the article goes, $300 is impressive, but the costs of wasted electricity will eat up the savings eventually compared to just dropping some cash on a new Synology NAS, and you get a warranty.

There is a Hamburg based startup called Protonet which are targeting smaller agencys with basically the formfactor you describe.

They offer a drop-in solution that acts as your wifi ap, provides everything from "local cloud" data storage to offering a complete groupware solution ontop of it. Thats why they are so expensive, but their potential customerbase is huge and they've got the product design in a good position.

(Not affiliated with protonet anyhow, just like the stuff they do.) https://protonet.info/en/product/comparison/

Agree with you and the OP, for me I always work with these servers (or am supposed to with my cloud research), and wanted to toy around with one on my own.

The noise of the CS24-SC actually isn't so bad (as others report).

The power is 400W, less pulled when the whole system is idled. So not horrible.

We do not run 24/7, this isn't being used as a traditional server.

We turn it on to manipulate large VM images (my case), or to run an algorithm that needs a lot of RAM and cores (her case).

So it runs at most 8-10 hours, 2-4 times a week.

Sysadmin as well, proudly running a 4U supermicro box as my home fileserver. If I can find a tower that can hot swappably fit that many drives, I'd look twice, but there are some other small advantages. Redundant power is nice in some situations, as is ECC if you really care about that sort of thing. Finally, given the sheer amount of processor overhead a dual socket gives you, it was easy for me to also utilize the machine as a VM server. As other posts have pointed out, an out of box IPMI system is additionally hard to turn down; these are all capabilities that I simply have not found together in commodity products.

My point I guess, is that I think there's still situations that merit rolling your own "Server box", even at home. (Not to disagree with anything you said, but to provide my own outlook)

I don't think a Synology would have the horsepower that the story author was after. He specified that he was going to be chewing through large datasets, so the dual Xeons @2.3GHz were important to him. Synologies are great for what they do, but underpowered for CPU/RAM-intensive tasks...at least in the sub $500 range, which is what he was looking to spend.

I'm a happy Synology owner, but I don't use it for my dev server. It sits behind my VPN and serves media files. With the variable speed drives (WD Green) and ARM chip, it draws very little power. In short, I love it for the specific purpose for which it was designed, but I wouldn't use it for much else. My dev server is in AWS. It's just too easy to spin up and spin down whenever I need it and keeps me from having to devote space in my apartment (SF aint cheap!). Also, not having a hefty power bill is nice.

If I were advising the story author, I'd tell him that unless part of the enjoyment is building and running the thing, he should opt for a cloud provider instead. He could get a DO droplet spec'd beyond the physical server he bought for $0.12/hr and spin it up whenever he wanted to use it. Unless he's planning on using it almost continuously, you can fit a lot of 12-cent hours into a $310 budget, and that's before you consider the increased energy usage from running a server at home.

> With the variable speed drives (WD Green)

None of Western Digital's HDDs change their RPM. It is fixed.

The WD docs for Intellipower indicate that RPM is one of the things they vary to conserve power. I can't find much in the way of specifics, but since they list the RPM of the drives as "Intellipower", the assumption would be that they don't operate at a fixed RPM.

The RPM varies between different models. Each drive has a fixed RPM [1][2].

From SPCR:

> Western Digital doesn't want to say that they're selling 5,400 RPM drives — those became second class in the desktop market years ago. Instead, they rate the drive's speed as "IntelliPower" and take pains to emphasize that there are other factors that affect performance.

Western Digital has caught a lot of flak for withholding the rotation speed of the Green Power, especially when the product was first launched and the marketing material listed the rotation speed as 5,400-7,200 RPM. This led some to speculate that the rotation speed changed dynamically during use — which would have been an impressive engineering feat had it been true. The reality is revealed by a sentence that Western Digital added to the description of IntelliPower: "For each GreenPower™ drive model, WD may use a different, invariable RPM." In other words, Western Digital reserves the right to release both 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM drives under the Green Power name — without telling you which are which.

We were able to confirm that our 750 GB Green Power had a spindle speed of 5,400 RPM by analyzing its sound spectrum. Why sound? Sound is vibration; the pitch of the sound corresponds to the frequency of the vibration. Hard drives vibrate at the speed of their motor, so they produce a noise at the same frequency as their rotation speed. Our sample had a sharp spike at exactly 90 Hz (cycles per second). Multiplying that number by 60 (to get cycles per minute) yielded a measured rotation speed of 5,400 RPM.

[1] http://www.silentpcreview.com/article786-page2.html

[2] http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=23526214#p23526...

"The 19" rack really is something from a past era. Soon people will look at it the same way I look at old mainframes and minicomputers."

Hah, you do realize that the origin of the 19 inch relay rack is indeed the original main frames (of phone systems). And the main frame of an early computer was naturally built on the same hardware infrastructure.

And then the first "minis" (e.g. PDP-7, PDP-8, PDP-11, et al) were built on the 19 inch form factor too.

I just had to point that part out; I completely agree with your main point: the remaining colo rack I use is a mix of 4U, 2U and 1U "servers" plus a couple of tower machines. This is for personal use; for work we don't bother to even own our own hardware infrastructure any more.

A lightly used i5/i7 with a bunch of RAM and an SSD would be a much, much better host.

I rescued a Dell workstation with an i7-950 from disposal, and added 2 disks and some RAM (9GB). Still not as quick as a 2500k in a lot of stuff but great for anything I can throw at it (decent size MySQL DB, lots of Rails apps, and quite a bit of web traffic). I could bump it up to 24GB but that's still $250 worth of RAM, new.

Yeah, the RAM alone is a costly thing actually.

I was lucky to find it so cheap :-)

ECC is nice, especially coupled with ZFS.

IMHO a bare-bones PC is a bit over the top for a home setup. Broken laptop is the way to go if you want to get the power requirements and noise down. Really it comes down to whether the broken laptop will do what you need it to and the price is very competitive compared to even the most basic (and slow) VPS. You can also pop in an SSD and the broken-laptop server sings along.

I should define broken - this is where a keyboard or screen has died yet the actual gubbins work as Intel intended. What you don't want is where the CPU has fried the thermal paste and gone hot for an extended time. That won't run good even if 'fixed'.

A broken-laptop-server will also contain battery backup. The power supply is definitely hot-swappable if you happen to have another power adapter for it.

Really there should be some USB-stick version of a common version of Linux that is completely optimised for power management with the intended use being a redundant laptop turned into a home server. It could have wake on lan magic packet in use too, effectively making it a device that only uses power if you actually use the device. This would be a complete contrast to the normal over-engineered server arrangement.

Broken laptops are certainly overlooked as an option, but you also have to be aware of your use-case. RAID is generally not available, and if you want to crunch lots of data as in the article, CPU and RAM aren't usually much to write home about. Horses for courses.

We are using this server sporadically, essentially wake-on-lan.

Especially with the BMC console, we can remotely power it on, off, reset, etc.

Not really a "mistake" they are different. A machine destined for a data center will have an IPMI subsystem in it, that is the thing you can run the machine remotely from, reflash the bios and reboot if you want. A data center machine will probably have ECC RAM which a barebones PC won't unless you are picky and find the one sku that ASUS and Gigabyte make that both have ECC capable chipsets and support in the BIOS. And lastly a datacenter machine will be more comfortable running headless than a barebones PC so there won't be any thing popping up on the VGA screen and saying "press any key to continue." Lastly a machine expecting to be in a rack in a data center probably has some insane fan noise when the fans spin up :-).

>a datacenter machine will be more comfortable running headless than a barebones PC so there won't be any thing popping up on the VGA screen and saying "press any key to continue."

        Foreign configuration(s) found on adapter.
        Press any key to continue or 'C' to load the configuration utility,
        or 'F' to import foreign configuration(s) and continue.
        
        All of the disks from your previous configuration are gone. If this is
        an unexpected message, then please power off your system and check your cables
        to ensure all disks are present.
        Press any key to continue, or 'C' to load the configuration utility.
        
        Entering the configuration utility in this state will result in drive
        configuration changes. Press 'Y' to continue loading the configuration utility
        or please power off your system and check your cables to ensure all disks are
        present and reboot.

But generally speaking, that's more or less true (except for the temperamental LSI based controllers)

noise be damned

Holy crap you're not kidding. I (briefly) had a 1U server in an upstairs home office for a project, it got banished to the basement within an hour because of the jet-turbine noise coming off of it. I could still hear it in the basement.

I don't think it's special at all.

I work with these things in my cloud research and thought it'd be cute to play around with one at home.

Partly because of the challenge at getting an old clunker back into a working state.

And partly because I like dogfooding and really knowing what it takes to run an entire stack---including the hardware underneath me.

Those are my real reasons. This was for fun :-)

All that is fine and dandy, but the RAM. These days RAM is so much more expensive! 4GB DDR3 is around $8-$10/GB. So his 24GB memory alone would cost around $200 at least.

Precisely, you get it.

This RAM was _insanely_ cheap :-)

Sure, it's cheaper than buying new RAM, but it's also

* 5+ years old

* has a peak transfer rate that's only 40% of contemporary PC3-12800

And the whole point of the article is cheapness.

As in, some people buy old clunker cars and fix them up as a hobby and also sometimes for cheapness.

Sure, they pollute more, get less MPG, etc. etc.

But they can be dirt cheap, and fun to restore if you like that kind of thing.

"Plus the Xeon E5410 is a 2007 chip (7 years old!) and gets it butt kicked by even a low end i3 from 2012"

Yes, but in an age of ZFS, can a non-xeon support ECC RAM ?

I think a rackmount home server is a good choice if you already have other rackmount equipment in place, such as switches and routers.

If that server is the only rackmount device you're going to get, then I think it's probably unnecessary.

The i3s support ECC. The i5s and i7s don't because that's where intel branches their consumer from their server models.

Actually, it seems some (not all) laptop CPUs from the i3 up to the i7 do support ECC, while the desktop versions don't.

Search for ECC in the pages below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i3_micropro...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_micropro...

Depends if you want compute heavy HPC/Big data the dual xenon's with 128GB memory and 30-40 TB of DASD are the way to go.

And a lot of the consumer boards cant handle that many of the Tesla cards they run out of PCI lanes