I’m ready to graduate from my Raspberry Pi era of selfhosting and buy hardware specifically for use as a server.
I’ve been recommended in the past to look for used Lenovo Thinkstations and/or Dell Optiplex, but it has been so many years since I’ve shopped for a computer, I don’t know what kind of specs to look for. What are the types of specs I should look for to get the best value for money?
I’m hoping to spend around $300-400, get something that can be upgraded in the future to last 10+ years, and do the following things:
- YUNoHost / reverse proxy
- Nextcloud with a custom domain for email addresses, cloud drive, photos
- Music Streaming with something like Navidrome
- Serve static websites
- pi-Hole
- Maybe pi-VPN
And someday maybe:
- Host game servers like minecraft
- Jellyfin for videos
- Kodi and output to TV?
So far based on my selfhosted journey, I expect to want the following:
- Room for 3+ Hard Drives
- External UPS (probably will go with the cheap APC at Microcenter that’s always on sale).
- Solid Power Supply / Cooling
- probably 1000 gigabit Networking (?)
The types of questions I have for Thinkstations / Optiplex:
- How is the Power Supply / Cooling?
- Processor? Do I need i5? i7? Generations? AMD? Clock Speed? I’m completely lost here.
- How much RAM do I need?
- Do I need a discrete graphics card? Can Thinkstations / Optiplex have a graphics card added to them later?
- Anything else I’m missing?
Thanks!
I could get by with 2 HD bays – it is more because I would like to use RAID if possible, and have an easier time to upgrade to larger capabilities as time goes on.
I’ve also just appreciated larger cases with more room – with small cases sometimes it’s hard to work in there.
Internal redundancy would be nice to have with a file server, but probably not necessary if I can have redundancy with regular backups instead.
Thanks for the ideas!
Oh, I hear ya on the space issue - there’s almost no space in this SFF, but I like it’s form factor so I’m willing to compromise.
Anymore I don’t find RAID very useful, except for mirroring a drive. As I say this, I do have a NAS with 5 drives, but it’s used as one of my replicators as it’s too slow for anything else. I did run Proxmox with RAID for a while, that was pretty cool, I just don’t need all it’s capability.
These days I can get a large enough single drive for a box - I considered getting a 12TB but the price on the 8 was hard to beat and I won’t be filling it anytime soon.
transitioning away from raid but I do love zfs for flexibility. A lot of the data I have is important for someone or somebody, so zfs and a decent backup solution is in use just to make sure. I went bananas and picked up a used Supermicro 4-node server that takes dual E5 Zeons (V1 or V2) with 2xE5-2620s and 49 gig ram in each node for £80 (I’m in the UK). Plenty of power and next is to upgrade the cpus to slightly better cpus to reduce power as it currently uses 2 nodes and I am pulling around 300 watts most of the time. Backup solution is an old Ryzen 3200G with 32 gig ram that runs truenas and has 5x3tb spinny drives in it
IMHO for 2 drives you don’t want redundancy. (I assume that is what you want RAID for, mirroring?). The per-drive failure rate is so low that you are unlikely to encounter it and nothing you are running seems particularly availability sensitive. Having a bit of downtime to rebuild in the very rare case of a drive failure is fine. The extra storage space is way more valuable.