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by leptons 99 days ago
Cheap to buy old hardware, but electricity to run those old rigs isn't really cheap in many areas now. My server is costing me about $100/month in electricity costs.

It does have 16 spinning disks in it, so I accept that I pay for the energy to keep them spinning 24/7, but I like the redundancy of RAID10, and I have two 8-disk arrays in the machine. And a Ryzen-7 5700G, 10gbit NIC, 16 port RAID card, and 96GB of RAM.
3 comments
shellwizard 99 days ago
It depends on the type of hardware that you use for your server. If it's really server grade you're totally right. For example cheap memory+CPU+MB x99 off AliExpress are cheap but they're not very efficient.

In my case I fell in love with the tiny/mini/micros and have a refurbish Lenovo m710q running 24/7 and only using 5W when idling. I know it doesn't support ECC memory or more than 8 threads, but for my use case is more than enough

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gessha 99 days ago
I’ve been watching some storage and homelab-themed videos and I heard there’s a lot of optimizations you can do to lower power usage - spinning the disks down, turning the machine on for a limited time, etc.
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leptons 98 days ago
That doesn't work for me. The main server is constantly using the disks to record security cameras, run VMs 24/7, Plex, a web server, a VPN (so I can dial in to my local network remotely), and a lot more.
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matja 99 days ago
How have you measured the power usage/cost? That seems like a incredibly high price for electricity, similar to a 600W constant load in my part of the world.
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leptons 98 days ago
All of my IT equipment in my office is running through a single UPS that measures power consumption.

I do have a bit more than just that server hooked up to it. There's also a Dell i5 running DDWRT as my main gateway/router, the fiber internet modem, a small Synology NAS, a couple of WIFI routers, etc. It all adds up.

That doesn't include my backup server out in the garage with another 8-disk RAID10 array and an LTO tape drive that is often backing up data, 5 more WIFI routers around the property, and 10 or so security cameras. So I'm probably well over $100/mo for all my tech stuff.

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