Comment on Has anyone bought from Save My Server before?

• 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:

  • Raid is perfectly feasible in consumer hardware. If your motherboard doesn’t have enough SATA ports, you can always get an HBA or a JBOD to support for more disks. There’s really no good reason (that I have heard of) for hardware raid today. Just remember raid is not a backup :)
  • There are consumer ATX PSUs with redundancy. However, the only reason for PSU redundancy is when you cannot tolerate downtime due to a PSU or UPS failure, and that redundancy might save you a few hours of uptime over 10+ years in comparison to a non-redundant consumer PSU that you can go out and buy if it fails. When was the last time you had a (reputable) PSU fail on you? What kind of uptime are you targeting? If you don’t have an answer for that, 99% is very easy to reach even on consumer gear, and is a strong indicator that you don’t need enterprise levels of redundancy. 99% is literally 3 days of downtime per year. Also keep in mind that redundant PSUs are just going to gobble more power and increase operating costs.
  • KVM features - this was the big one for me. I wanted to be able to perform out-of-band remote maintenance on my servers. Then I took a leap and got a Sipeed NanoKVM, and I haven’t looked back. there are plenty of them out there - PiKVM is another reputable one. When buying old enterprise servers, you often have to pay for the remote management license, and that is just another added cost. Not to mention that they lose support pretty quickly, and you end up running out of date software on one of your most critical interfaces to the machine. A NanoKVM, PiKVM, and others aren’t built into the machine, so they continue to be supported for much longer.

  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!

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  • 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.

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  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Intel AMT also works for out of band management on consumer hardware.

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  • 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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