cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24850430

EDIT: i had an rpi it died from esd i think

EDIT2: this is also my work machine and i sleep to the sound of the fans

  • hendrikEnglish
    25•2 days ago

    Good choice. I think people often invest too much into hardware and SBCs, when an old laptop does just fine. Just monitor the battery or remove it, if you run that for years and unsupervised in the broom closet.

    • @Jesus_666
      9•2 days ago

      Depends. If you want something that will keep your files reasonably safe and accessible then a laptop isn’t great because most of them won’t let you mount multiple hard drives without doing something silly like running everything over USB.

      Of course that’s where an old desktop is the computer of choice.

      • hendrikEnglish
        4•2 days ago

        Yeah, it really depends on the use-case. I’ve attached several external harddisks via USB to unsuitable hardware before. That kinda works, but isn’t a good choice. But for some selfhosting of Bitwarden, home autiomation and calendar sync, an old laptop is more than enough. After that I bought an efficient mainboard, lots of RAM and built my own NAS for my files, and it does the other stuff as well.

        • @Jesus_666
          2•22 hours ago

          Yeah, it doesn’t take a lot to build a decent home server. I just rebuilt mine (the old one’s Turion II Neo was perhaps a bit too weak) and the most expensive part were the HDDs. I didn’t want to reuse the old ones.

          A slightly underclocked Athlon 3000G, 16 gigs of spare RAM, and three 4 TB WD Red Pluses give me all the power I actually need at a reasonable power budget. I initially wanted to go with an N100 but those never support more than two SATA drives directly.

            • @Jesus_666
              1•22 hours ago

              My bad. I went with the WD Red Plus, model WD40EFPX. It’s basically the successor to the old CMR Red line. The Pro line has 7200 RPM and is a bit noisier, which isn’t great for a living room server.

              I’ll correct my earlier comment.

    • @StitchIsABitch
      5•2 days ago

      I started out with a laptop and it worked fine, but I always wondered, wouldn’t the energy consumption be much higher? Even with the screen off, a laptop isn’t made to run 24/7, right?

      • hendrikEnglish
        4•1 day ago

        I think it’s mainly the battery that isn’t made for 24/7 charging. The other components are fine. And as a laptop is made not to waste electricity, it’s efficient with the energy consumption, too. Just turn off the screen and it’ll use as much as a Raspberry Pi or less…