• qaz
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    1 year ago

    What would you recommend? Where can one find those businesses units? I looked on ebay but was only able to find normal mini computers, no energy efficient SBC ARM boards.

    • @Cobrachicken
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      31 year ago

      Maybe this provides a good starter read: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/

      There are more in detail later articles, also dealing withore modern units, and the prices are from 2020, where lockdown and other factors spiked a big demand.

      I’m more into beginner’s server units, and I’ve sourced a Supermicro X10 based 1u server for EUR 75 including shipping on one ebay night.

      Patience is the key, and probably best set yourself an upper limit price wise.

      • qaz
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        1 year ago

        Thanks, but I’m using a refurbished Lenovo Tiny Thinkcentre as server for selfhosting already. I was just hoping to find a more energy efficient ARM SBC board like previously mentioned.

        €75 is pretty impressive, the lowest I’ve seen was €95 w/o shippinng and w/o CPU, RAM, PSU.

        • @Cobrachicken
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          21 year ago

          Ah sry, I misread your post. I’ve done the math on the energy consumption of the small fleet of ARM SBCs I used to have for server things, and came up with a surprisingly high number, up to 80W with all peripherals. This, plus the cable mess (although I tried to minimalize that by putting them in gutted rack router cases and such) made me consolidate all services into two X10 based servers. One is backup/playground and usually off, one is the prod unit. They idle around 20-30W and are tucked away in a rack.

          So, for my use case one x86 unit with Proxmox is more energy efficient than going the ARM way. Added comfort gain is standard cases, cabling, PSP and IPMI.

          On the negative side, one has to watch out not getting totally sucked into the homelabbing rabbit hole ;-)

    • Bitals
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      21 year ago

      @qaz
      You pretty much just look under your feet usually. Globally they get dumped in bulk on ebay, local platforms for p2p sales of used stuff also have them in most of the world.
      @Cobrachicken

    • poVoqOPM
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      21 year ago

      Search for “refurbished thin client” or something like that. The popular ones are usually from HP.