If price is the deciding factor then just build one.
Get an old i7 for dirt cheap, cram the thing with ram and storage to suit your budget.
Run something lightweight like Ubuntu Server.
this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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Keep in mind this could drive up your energy bill.
It totally doesn't
I'm running a 14th gen i9 with a 4080. It's a power hungry boy. 1500w power supply. Generally using about 600-800w.
Running this 24/7 costs me <$10/month in electricity.
The old compaq presario with a Pentium II that probably pulled down 100w running Ubuntu server as described here made no statistically significant change in my electric bill. That is to say, it's about as much change as being good or bad at turning off your lights when you're not using them. It's negligible.
At 600 watts running continuously wouldn't that be 432 kWh a month?
Assuming you didn't mean you were running your gaming computer as the server.
At 100 watts that comes out to 72 kWh, in CT where I live rates are waaaay higher then what I calculate your rate to be (around 2.5 cents per kWh)
For me a 100 watt server is about ~$22 a month to run.
Are you sure your paying 2.5 cents per kWh?
Idk what I'm paying per kwh, I am just going off my monthly bills.
There are other power fluctuates, I'm sure. I pay it no mind I just look at the bill. 🤷♂️
So far no bill has arrived that made me change behavior.
Edit: I've also never measured what my machine actually pulls down continuously/when idle. I just know that it's components demand that range, and that I need the headroom in my power supply for spikes.
That's great if it works for you. However, a lot of us don't want the bigger power bill. It also has the problem of heating everything up.
I like CPUs with lower TDPs
No "old i7" as I suggested, is going to meaningfully increase the temp of your room if it has any cooling solution in place.
Your stubbornness around a perfectly practical solution is absurd. I won't bother convincing you further -- it's the obvious cost effective solution.
The problem is it isn't cost effective with electricity. You can pick up a CPU that is more efficient.
I'm not saying your wrong but what your describing is not great for some people including myself.
Your not wrong but there are also trade offs
Get a mainboard and CPU supporting ECC ram. Combine it with ZFS as the file system. With this setup you are safe from bitrot.
You could get one of those cheap N100 boards and a couple refurbished enterprise HDD's. Board costs about 150, case & PSU another 150, which leaves you with enough to buy 2 10ish TB drives, a boot drive and some additional RAM. Power usage should be pretty decent.
Another option is going with a second hand Mini PC and a DAS. I went with this myself because it's the cheapest and easiest option. It cost me about €150 combined (excluding the cost of the 2 drives I had laying around), and it has served me well for the past year. The CPU is a bit weak (i5-6500T) and it doesn't have a lot of RAM (8GiB), but it handles the 30ish docker containers and video transcoding (single stream) well.
I've also bought an old proliant micro server and I wouldn't really recommend it. It uses a lot of power and it was kind of a pain to get running. I'm planning on installing a HBA adapter and using it as a backup system.
Get a old used desktop from eBay. Use either Intel QuickSync (Intel integrated) or a dedicated GPU.
Additionally, use a LTS and keep good backups. Fedora Server shouldn't be used for anything actively depended apon. You could move to Rocky Linux, Debian or something else.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| LTS | Long Term Support software version |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| PSU | Power Supply Unit |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| ZFS | Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity |
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.
[Thread #745 for this sub, first seen 12th May 2024, 12:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Currently ugreen has released some nas systems that seem powerful but have yet to be shipped (reviews are out though).
I use an HP microserver gen 8, which I bought second hand (300$) and upgraded with a better CPU (20$ from ebay) and extra ram (80$) and 4 2TB SSD's (100$ per). I installed Windows server on it because I just wanted it to work in a way I'm familiar with, but a colleague of mine installed Synology OS on it. You can use the cd drive bay for the OS disk (with some tweaking). Since you already have the disks, this would fit your budget.
I have the gen 10 plus (with an upgraded cpu). I am very happy with that.
My recommendation would be building a Jonsbo NAS. They're relatively affordable. You probably also want a mobile CPU for better efficiency. I don't recommend ARM as it will greatly limit the variety of software you can run on it. Erying and CWWK/Topton make ITX mobos with mobile CPUs. These are Chinese brands but I don't really see anyone else making them.
The cheapest and easiest thing to do would be to just use an old standard desktop computer case that can hold a few HDDs.
Additionally ARM is mostly a miss when it comes to transcoding.