Comment on "This Is The ONLY Home Server You Should Buy" Or, why older computers may be better for the environment | Hardware Haven

Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

It really depends on what you’re doing with it and on what old PCs you have available.

I have an N100 Mini-PC at home in my living room connected to my TV which is both a home server and a TV-Box using Kodi (I even have a remote for it).

Having modern image and video decoding in hardware is pretty useful when I’m using it as a TV Box (there is zero stutter with it), whilst the rest of the time the thing mostly sits doing some low CPU-intensive server tasks (mainly torrenting and SMB server stuff).

Also, it’s a small box that fits fine on my TV stand without standing out and runs silent pretty much all of the time.

Further, I don’t have any low power consuming old PCs around - the best are some chunky old notebooks, the rest are old gaming PCs which eat more power idle than the mini PC does at full load - and even the notebooks aren’t that low power as all that.

Mind you, for many years I used an old Asus EEE PC as home file server (with external HDs) and had a separated dedicated hardware TV Media Server box playing files from it, but eventually that PC stopped working and I found out I could just use my Router as a file server.

Last but not least, judging for how long I kept using my TV Media Server boxes (which over almost 2 decades I had 2 different ones and which as dedicated hardware could not easilly be upgraded when new video compression standards came out) 10+ years is definitelly my time-frame for using that Mini-PC.

All this to say that you should consider using old hardware, especially if you have some around and it’s task appropriate (like I did before using an old Asus EEE mini-pc as a home file server), but also take in account what you’re going to do it and consider if new hardware won’t be better over the timespan you will likely be using it and if the being able to get a more task appropriate form factor (like how having a little box-size Mini PC lets me have it in my living room on a TV stand next to my TV and my fiber router) is worth it.

In summary, before you get hardware you should ponder a bit about what you intend to do with it before you decide what to get, don’t be afraid of using stuff you already have and also don’t be afraid to get new stuff if it’s actually justified by hardnosed reasons rather than merely some variant of the “new stuff smell” psychological effect when buying new.

source
Sort:hotnewtop