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)?

  • fozid@feddit.ukEnglish
    4·
    15 hours ago

    Honestly it all depends on what you need both now and in the future.

    I’m running lots of services on a cheap mini pc I got for £80, it’s an N100 CPU, 32gb ddr4 ram, 512nvme, then has 2x8tb hdd’s and 2x2tb ssd’s which are in a raid1 area served with lvm.

    Running vault warden, immich, navidrome, adguardhome, torrent setup, sterling Pdf, filebrowser, radicale, WebDAV server, searxng, syncthing. This has 4 daily users.

    It’s barely under any load running all that and is silent and draws a max of 15w. I feel I could double the services if I wanted

    I personally plan on building a desktop pc specifically to be my server in the next few years as an upgrade to my current setup, but won’t be for at least another 18 months as currently have no bottlenecks or issues.