Ask HN: What hardware are you running for your home server?
Obviously interested in all of it, but here is what I am rally trying to solve:
I live in an apartment, so unfortunately I cannot run full fat rack mounted equipment for space, heat, and noise reasons. Also, a partner who isn't keen on the sight of it
I was thinking maybe some small thinkcenter or dell micro PCs + a NAS (Thinking QNAP because they are cheaper). Lower TDP would be great too. Power costs are a concern.
Thinking about Nextcloud, plex, jellyfin, home assistant, local backups, etc... I know that it evolves quickly
98 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadAlso I don’t wanna spend another $1000, though it looks like that’s what it’ll take. Between HDDs and a new case (I already have a good enough mb,cpu,ram,psu config that I can canabalize from elsewhere). Biggest issue is finding a cheap case that has the expansion available for more drives. They just don’t make cases like that anymore and all the people near me wanna sell a full pc for 100s. I just don’t need that.
i7-2600
16 GB RAM
2 hard drives: 1.5 TB system, 14 TB network storage
Runs:
HAProxy
A custom written blog on Payara
PostgreSQL
Funkwhale
Pi-Hole
ReadyMedia/miniDLNA
nginx (for webdav)
Used to run Jitsi and Ergo IRCd, but haven't needed them anymore
Since I've recently moved my daily driver desktop to the basement (with the help of long cables and a hole in the floor), I might eventually use KVM to run them off the same box.
Everything is fast thanks to an SSD and caching m.2. I max out 1gbit over SMB.
Snapshots have saved potential days/weeks worth of troubleshooting in total and is a must have. Cold backups are easy with Hyper Backup.
I couldn't ask for more.
https://mitxpc.com/products/mitx-4125a
I run Jellyfin, Torrents, some backups, Minecraft, Matrix server, a Matrix bridge, Metabase, Mumbe server Navidrome and a few odds and ends.
Running a bunch of virtual machines. Plenty of power, stays cool and takes up very little room.
External drive, 18 TB
hosts bunch of web services 24/7 - calibre, jelyfin, qbittorent, hfs web server to host files, tailscale vpn etc. The 4k projector, TV, and HiFi are connected to it. I can even do programming on it from the sofa when I feel like it.
great for surfing the web, hording, media and even games.
basically 0 maintenance
I hate dedicated stuff like synology, and non-applications they provide - its too much work and configuration, too expensive too and they feel toyish. I prefer OTB full OS (Windows 10 in my case) with normal tools (for example foobar player, vscode editor, doublecmd file manager, mvp video player, normal package manager) and easy to use and replace stuff. For example, I use another external drive for periodic backups, with custom powershell scripts that do incremental backups and verify them, disconnected all the time until backup should be done (to protect from viruses and surges). I can take backup drive with me for offline consumption of all the data, or access my network via VPN (you definitelly need offline access to your data as internet connection may suck when you are not at home)
Its all under 1k EUR.
I probably should have stuck with ESXi. Running Home Assistant as HAOS has some conveniences that may be worthwhile depending on how much like you to tinker. But it also runs totally fine in a Docker container and that has it's own upsides.
The CPU and associated power usage is nice, but I don't think it will pay for itself in that regard.
~700GB of cache/ container volumes on the 2.5"s as a mergerfs pool, ~38T across the HDDs in mergerfs+snapraid.
Noise and heat are kept at a meaningfully low level, and the case blends in appropriately with the living room. All the normal home-cloud workloads, along with k8s homelab stuff (so I can computer janitor in my free time).
That said, I use an old workstation as my home router and server. It’s worth the power bills in saved subscription cost alone. Much more relevant is how much of my time I spend on it!
It's basically like a Raspberry Pi, but with a beefier GPU. It's not extremely fast, but is decent as a web and file server.
TDP is extremely low, 3W idle, 8W top.
There's also a enterprise HP switch where I disabled the fan and it reports "temperature normal" even though it is in the same cabinet. Fibre to OPNsense in the living room.
It doesn't have to be complicated or pretty.
I also have a dell micro with a 6th gen i7 and 16GB ram I use as my primary windows machine, but previously it was hosting all the aforementioned services by itself.
I'd go with some kind of mini PC and an external drive or two, or direct attached storage rather than a synology
The NUCs run my HA kubernetes cluster and all the apps I run out of my home. The Pis are primarily for playing around. The NAS is my general NFS server storage which mostly gets used by my k8s cluster.
https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster
It tops out at a higher power, but idle is something like 15 watts, so still low enough to forget about.
Their systems were relatively cheap and perform well. Community is a bit smaller as opposed to the Synology one though.
Depending on your use case, maybe just run a couple $5 machines on DigitalOcean?
It stays in the TV cabinet in our living room.
https://captnemo.in/setup/homeserver/