I’m currently facing a dilemma. Right now, I have a synology NAS that I use to host my homelab containers (*arr, pi-hole, vaultwarden, Plex, etc).
I am planning to offload as much of that as possible to a dedicated machine, which hopefully will allow me to continue self-hosting even more demanding services (Immich, etc).
I was lucky enough to get a proper server - Supermicro, for free, with 64GB Ram DDR4 and 1TB. However, I plugged it in and that thing is NOISY.
My rack will be in the home office, where I will spend at least 8 hours a day, so I can’t afford that level of noise.
What should I do? Should I try to sell the supermicro and buy something else with that money? Should I keep the RAM and SSD (and CPUs?) and build something else with them? Are there any quiet servers I could look into (I am guessing better performance but more expensive), or Should I go the MiniPC route instead (cheaper and smaller, but more limited specs)?
I’ve done both, there are very few scenarios where I’d pick a full sized server over a few mini PCs in a homelab. The only time I’d consider a larger footprint in a homelab is for a custom built NAS.
I have all the services you’ve mentioned and more and I’m pretty sure I could comfortably host them on a singular mini PC that I could pick up on ebay for $200 at most. Switching to a Mini PC is also making it easier for you to consider things that require multiple discrete systems in the future and there’s a lot of cool things you can do in that space.
Even for the larger footprint, I would just use a larger desktop case.
If power is a big enough issue that dual power supplies would help, i’d rather run three small computers or desktops in a k8s setup.