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HamsterRage@lemmy.ca 4 days agoI watched a whole bunch of videos about those and it totally looks like they would work electronically. But most of them wouldn’t fit in any of the ports on the back without modification and 3D printing magic. Some people left them “just hanging out”.
BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
So, there’s also a 4 port Ethernet card fitted specifically for the m series tiny lines that you used to be able to get from Lenovo with a riser (your specific model may not have a riser). You can still get it on eBay, but AliExpress is probably your spot if you’re not a big spender.
Some specific revisions in the tiny lines won’t even have the spot where you’d plug a riser card into populated, I think the 910q may be one of the ones where it’s missing. The qs sometimes indicate the lowest spec but not always. The m910x will definitely have it and most specialty models in the m9xx(x) range will also have a riser slot. The cards come with a specially fitted bracket you can use though that will fit pretty seamlessly. The bracket is purchaseable separately pretty often and is repurposable with a bit of planning.
My purchases of used Lenovo hardware became problematic long ago.
HamsterRage@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Yeah, there is a line of units that has a PCI slot that then requires a riser card in order to be able to use it. The problem is that those units, from what I’ve seen, tend to cost at least twice as much as the M910Q/M710Q. Even the M920Q/M720Q are significantly more expensive. Not to mention, a bit more difficult to get hold of.
IMHO, once you’re talking about dropping $300-$350 on one of these models with the riser card, you really have to think hard about whether it’s worth it for 6th/7th generation Core i5 processors. Especially if you’re looking at a cluster of three. It seems highly probable that you could get something with an 11th/12th generation processor and multiple or 2.5GB ethernet ports for only a bit more, and you’d end up only needing two of them instead of three, and price might end up being a wash.
I am really, really curious to see how external USB 2.5GB or 5GB adapters would work. I’m getting the impression that they are a lot more reliable than they were even a few years ago, and might be a viable, cheap option.
All that being said, network speed hasn’t been an issue for me so far, and I’m not convinced that CEPH + HA, is a path I should be going down. Or a path that’s worth it for most self-hosters.
So far, the only thing that I’ve encountered that pushes the CPU on an ongoing basis is Frigate, and even that is performing well and not affecting other containers on the same host. But I’m still adding services to my cluster, so who knows.
BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
You can get x variants for under 100 too but you got to be more patient. Larger resellers don’t always understand the difference in models. You don’t have to go this in depth but look at the rear view for addons on the eBay listing. I usually don’t worry about buying ones with warranty/etc and I’ve only been burned once (probably water damage).
In my experience, if you’re wanting to use a USB Ethernet 2.5g or more, you may want to come up with at least a USB c port. I get that it should work with USB 3 but the speeds in practice just never worked out for me. I could have been facing those reliability issues you mentioned. Experiments in that area may eventually lead you back to scavenging for models that accommodate a riser card for 10g which is a very well weathered path. If you want Ceph, it’s not absolutely required but you’re probably going to end up there. I wouldn’t do Ceph again.
Somewhat similar on the CPU, I only discovered problems when I started experimenting with mass video re-encoding which is probably similar to the workload on Frigate. With the top on, I can only really use about half the cpus consistently. CPU upgrades are also mostly out.
Minor segue: If you haven’t checked out the servethehome forums, highly recommended. It’s probably the best source of knowledge on these.