Thank you for the feedback
What are you considering buying?
Mainly just the HDD’s. I already have a server, but having a bunch of extra drives for cheap is really tempting, especially since I haven’t filled out all of the bays
Comment on Has anyone bought from Save My Server before?
kensand@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Yeah, they’re legit. Bought a few servers from them over the years. No major issues, packing was good, reasonable ship time.
Had one case where they sent a different NIC than what was listed. They just shipped me the correct one and told me not to bother sending the old one back.
Stopped buying from them though because I prefer off-the-shelf modern consumer hardware nowadays. The real cost is always power consumption, and I prefer to shell out more money up front in exchange for huge savings on power usage down the line. I can always run over to microcenter and replace a part same-day as opposed to ordering it online and hoping it comes soon.
If you’re a home-labber, I’d strongly suggest doing the same. Some of those old enterprise servers just gobble power for not that much compute relative to current day consumer machines.
If I was still buying older servers though, I’d probably be looking at their prices.
What are you considering buying?
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
kensand@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Well then very little of what I said actually applies!
Unless you know the hours on a drive, you might get brand new ones, or you might get ones with 50k hours on them. They may also be from the same batch, which isn’t ideal for data durability. If you’re ok with all that, then go for it. I generally don’t buy used drives because I don’t want to take the additional risk.
I’d be surprised if you can’t find a better deal on used spinning rust though… the shipping alone is probably half the value on a good chunk of sales from SmS.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Unless you know the hours on a drive, you might get brand new ones, or you might get ones with 50k hours on them. They may also be from the same batch, which isn’t ideal for data durability.
If it helps, my strategy is to use RAID6 to handle up to 2 drive failures, and apart from the initial 4 drives needed to initially create the array, I just add another when I need more space. Then even if I get drives with sequential serial numbers, they’re going to have differing amount of life used.
Also, always keep a couple spare drives for quick swapping. Especially with RAID6 given how long rebuilding the array can take
Luckyfriend222@lemmy.world 3 days ago
This is an interesting take. I prefer the other way around, because of redundancy in things like PSU and raid etc. So your take is really interesting to me. I am rethinking my setups for sure.
kensand@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
I get that, that was also something I used to like about old servers, but let me float a few of the things that I’ve come to realize through my home-lab career to you:
One other thing that I’ll mention and you probably already know - enterprise servers are LOUD - even just a single one can literally sound like a jet engine. That’s not a hyperbolae. If this is your first one, don’t underestimate it. I had my servers in the basement with decent insulation, I used IPMI to throttle the fans back to 10%, and I could still hear the whine on my first floor when everything is quiet. If you end up having to turn down the fans due to noise, you’re going to start having heat issues, and then you’re losing out on performance and shortening component lifespan. Noise-proofing a server is non-trivial - you have to allow air flow still, and where there’s air flow, there’s a path for noise too. My current setups all have 120mm and 140mm fans, and I can barely hear them when I’m working right next to them. My 3D printers are the loud ones in the basement now!
Luckyfriend222@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Thank you for all the information. I have had servers now for 7 years already, and honestly I still love them. I run a bit more than just seflhosting home-based applications, but I totally get your point. I am a bit older, and therefor a bit more old-school :) I sleep safely to the hum of redundant PSUs and Hardware RAID SSDs, haha.
Especially thank you for PiKVM and NanoKVM. I am looking into that a bit.
I am fully off-grid, so power cost is not that big of a deal, and the servers are far enough away for the noise not to bother me.
I am not against anything you said, honestly. And I got a lot of new info. I am going to say this though: I am still not too convinced on the software RAID thing though. Maybe I am just too stupid, but I have not been able to get this going with the same ease, and have it recover as easily as proper hardware RAID. One day I will take the leap again and try to “get with the times”.
Thanks again for all the info! Honestly appreciate it.
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Intel AMT also works for out of band management on consumer hardware.
ikidd@lemmy.world 2 days ago
What’s your general self-hosting setup and what machines are you building for that? I’d like to have HA Proxmox running all the time on three nodes with a low power bill and lots of memory available (like 256GB) but space for memory seems to be difficult to find in a reasonable priced consumer board.
RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 3 days ago
I got a server for free and at one point, over half of my energy bill was for storing movies and nextcloud. Depends on the energy cost where you live, but for that price I could have paid for the highest tier of some cloud office suite that doesn’t run slow like nextcloud, and the highest plan of netflix.
Of course i chose self hosting, but this time with energy efficient hardware, server now takes 50 watts peak, with 4 hdds and an nvme. Asrock rack motherboard, with IPMI.
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
I don’t think I’ve ever had a quality brand PSU go out on me. Software RAID like MD or ZFS works fine on basically any hardware, and I wouldn’t use hardware RAID these days anyways.
I used to worry about that stuff and use enterprise hardware, but its just so expensive for decent performance, and so power hungry.