I have some old hardware lying around, I thought I could make some use of it. I plan to host abs, calibre and vaultwarden and a print server through CUPS. I am already hosting them on a fairly modern hardware but was thinking to shift them to a low end one as I want to host a proprietary software called computax on the 15 12th gen system. Does it makes sense to do.
The current installed chipset on the old hardware is Pentium g2130
Try it. I don’t think there will be any bottleneck as the services itself don’t need much cpu power.
One thing I am concerned about is the power draw. These old hardware tend to consume a lot of power thus ending up being costlier in long run rather than buying some new hardware like Intel n100
Is there a possibility of under-clocking, set lower power profiles, etc., does that help ?
You have the hardware, why not test it out? I have P330 + i5-8500t running my homelab and it takes around 10w at idle.
If your machine takes few watts with freshly installed proxmox, then around 10w after you installed all your services then i would say it’s worth it.
PS: I have enabled all the things that could save power, whether it’s in the bios or in the OS i.e. enabling powersave profile, ASPM, disabling USB and other ports that i don’t need.
Can you tell me how much was your idle wattage before applying these power saving features?
hmmm that I can’t tell. I only started measuring after few months of deploying my homelab and by then I was already running my services with said optimizations.
But I have plans to measure power consumptions of all my mini pcs for every permutation combination.
Beyond these did you do anything else?
Please share it once you have the data.
None that i can recall. No undervolting or any other hardware level shenanigans.
For experimentation and learning, DDR3 is still viable. For live production and reliability, it should not be considered. Some component/part is going to fail after being left powered on continously. The minimum viable today is a i3 6th gen with DDR4 in a branded system.
If you have something robust, like an optiplex or thinkstation, then you might be okay, but not with any enthusiast motherboard from that era. The generic boards are matured, but they’re not intended for continuous operation.
How reliable are these tiny/mini/micro PCs with a 6th gen Intel CPU or later for a set-it-up-and-forget kinda landscape with 24x7 operation like a nas/home media server/pi-hole etc.? Is it wise investing in these used hardware for such purposes?
I have two 6th gens, they’ve been very reliable in a 24/7 setting, the ones I have are Lenovo’s, I prefer them over the Dells because they don’t care which power adapter you use (original or not) and they’re usually much cheaper than HPs. I’ll be getting a few more in the next year.
This form factor was popularized for home server use by ServeTheHome: Introducing Project TinyMiniMicro Home Lab Revolution - ServeTheHome but it’s only in the last couple of years they’ve dropped to under 5k here.
You can do some pretty impressive computing with the newest models but its a very niche application because usually you don’t have space constraints for workstations.
I use them as mostly raspberry pi replacements but that’s because I’ve been infatuated with the idea of single purpose computers since the 8086/386 days.
I want one as a weather dashboard, another as a jellyfin transcoder, another as a nvr… these things use about as much electricity as a light bulb so why not? ha
If you already have it, or If you are getting them for dirt cheap, and you dont care much about power draw, thn yes.