What's a good budget home server?

foremanguy@lemmy.ml to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 65 points –

EDIT : I'm going to use a Lenovo P500 (at around $130) with 8 threads (will upgrade it later) and 64gb of RAM. It support the E5 v4 family so that's great. If someone knows the power consumption, that would be cool!

Hello, I want to build a "homelab" and I'm searching for a server, what do you propose me as good options? I need something with at least 64gb RAM, can buy used, and minimum 16vcores.. Around 150$ If you have any good options let's comment below 👇 THX ❤

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Used HP ProLiant. It’s nearly 10 years old, but has 16 cores 64GB of RAM, and is just under $150 with free shipping

https://www.ebay.com/itm/235286275608

The hidden cost of power usage could be a lot more expensive then something more modern though lol

Agreed. 100% would not recommend going this route for a homelab, but it does meet every specified requirement

Look at my edit do you think it's better?

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkStation/ThinkStation_P500/ThinkStation_P500_Spec.PDF

Got a 490W or 650W PSU. Looks like the CPU is probably around 9-10 years. I'd say probably not much. I bet it's idling would be around 120-200W depending on # of disks, disk type, and if your using the PCI slots.

For reference I'm running 4 Intel NUC11i7s, $400/unit bare metal, 64GB ram (2x32) $120-$130, and the most expensive part is the flash storage I am buying to fit my needs. Power on these are like 10W idle and max is like 60W each when using turbo.

do you think that this thing would be around 150W?? I think more about 50W Max, for example the cpu is relatively low-power

For comparison, I run a thinkstation p300 with i7-4790 (TDP 84W) 24/7 and the power usage looks like this:

Even when idling this old processor still guzzles 45W. Certainly not as nice as GP's that only use 10W during idle.

I am not the best at estimating power usage but like I said depends on the configuration it has. That's just CPU, not including powering everything else so it's idle load will be higher. RAM, disks, type of disk, amount of disks, GPU or other PCI cards, etc every additional component adds to the idle watt usage.

for sure but even with all my stuff I think that something like that would draw around 40-50W idle and up to 90W running

Found this https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/6943/lenovo-thinkstation-p500-tower-workstation-review/index.html#Power-Consumption-and-Final-Thoughts

They have some measurements from their machine though depending on GPU and CPU at least it'll probably be higher. Also, if your hosting stuff 24/7 your CPU load won't be 100% idle so you certainly would be higher than it depending on what you host.

Do you think it would be better to go to an consumer cpu instead of a xeon?

Server CPUs are built for the workload (hosting / background services) rather than desktop applications for consumer PCs. That being said generally your going to be more limited in disk / ram than CPU unless if you have some specific needs.

In my setup, my server resources are averaging 10% cpu, 54% memory, and ~70% storage. I'm running 4 PCs, 8 cores each so 32 cores, currently on memory I got 2x64GB and 2x16GB so 160GB ram. Between CPU and RAM I am utilizing basically 3.2 cores worth of processing and 86GB of ram. Most of my ram is going to postgres databases for speed improvement and it takes off load from the CPU.

Xeon E5-2670, with 115W TDP, which means 2x115=230W for the processor alone. with 8 ram modules @ ~3W each, it'll going to guzzle ~250W when under some loads, while screaming like a jet engine. Assuming $0.12/kwh, that's $262.8 per year for electricity alone.

Would be great if you have an isolated server room to contain the noise and cheap electricity, but more modern workstation should use at least 1/4 of electricity or even less.

I just want to correct something is that the TDP is the power under load, so if the cpu is not 100% used it could be 20 hours at 25W and 4 at 90W

Power scaling for these old CPU is not great though. Mine is slightly newer and on idle it still uses 50% of the TDP.

Wouldnt bother with Gen8. We literally throw them in the e-waste recycle bin.
Either get a Gen9 if tight with cash (also EOL) or Gen10 servers which are currently supported and get current updates.

If they are up for that, I'd be happy to part with mine for cheap. They'd need to get an E5-2650 (v2) to meet their 16 core requirement but a pair of those are pretty cheap.