[drdaeman]

This seems to be low-power entry-level stuff. I'm curious, is there anything more serious - but less serious than some proper rack server hardware?

Currently I'm running a home server on EPYC 3251 mini-ITX board, which I use to route 1GbE WAN and 10GbE LAN, serve as a NAS, and run a bunch of services all without it breaking a sweat, and leaving plenty of headroom shall I want to run more stuff there. It sits on my desk in a small-ish cubic Supermicro chassis and barely makes any noise beyond the normal HDD screeching. And it's an entry-level server-oriented board so I have proper LOM without having to throw in an IPKVM.

I would fancy an ARMv8 machine - just for fun of it (and possibly better performance per watt) - but I think I can't get anything comparable from a RPi-level hardware. But the next "step" I see when searching for ARM servers are those fan-screaming behemoths you put in a rack in a proper server room, which is something I dread for a homelab, as I don't have a dedicated room for it. I've had a pleasure of WfH involving setting up some PowerEdges in my living room, was fun but extremely noisy. So I wonder, where are the middle grounds?

[flyinghamster]

At this point, if you want a quiet, high-performance ARM system for home, Apple is worth a look, even if that means your "server" storage is plugged into Thunderbolt (and keeping in mind the Apple premium for RAM and internal storage).

[jrockway]

I'm interested too and have pretty much come to the same conclusion as you. There are workstations like this: https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-emag-64bit-arm-workstatio...

It's a middle ground between Raspberry Pi and a 128 core they sell to cloud providers. For the money, you can probably get more work done with an amd64 workstation, unless you're paying someone to generate your electricity by riding a bicycle or something. (Cooling and power matter to cloud-scale datacenters, but not really for one computer in a room that you use to generate your income.)

[drdaeman]

Goodness gracious, five grand, only 3 drive bays, and that's without drives? My whole AMD machine (motherboard, RAM, PSU, NVMe SSD, case - basically everything except for the HDDs for the bulk storage) costed me slightly less than $2k, and I've surely overprovisioned.