[craftkiller]

> I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people.

I just want to warn people who haven't heard server-grade hardware in-person before: this is only for people who can put a server rack somewhere unpopulated like a garage or basement. Servers will make you think "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet". They are not suitable for apartment dwellers such as myself. When I was setting up my 1U before shipping it off to a colo, I wrote scripts and had detailed plans of the things I needed to run so I could minimize the time it was making my ears bleed.

[zrm]

The noise problem is pretty easy to mitigate by choosing 2U servers instead of 1U. The latter are forced by the form factor to use smaller, higher speed fans.

A bigger issue for enterprise hardware is that it's optimized for performance per watt under load, not idle power consumption. Running a mostly-idle rack server 24/7 can result in a pretty sizable electric bill. This also depends heavily on the model. Some will idle at ~50 watts, others at ~300, but both of these are significantly higher than a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop which for personal use will generally do the job.

Business class desktops are also a good alternative here. Many models have pretty reasonable idle power consumption (check this for yourself, I've seen 6W but also 60W) and then you get a couple of drive bays and PCIe slots and expandable RAM which you don't get from a Raspberry Pi.

[SR2Z]

These days, pretty much the only thing that makes sense is a mini PC. AMD laptop chips generally trade blows with Apple stuff on power efficiency when you thrash them, and you get a surprisingly capable machine for not very much money.

It's really not worth it to run old hardware 24/7 unless it's making money. Buying a new machine of equivalent capability is (normally) pretty cheap, and it doesn't take very long for the power savings to pay for themselves.

They can be had with fairly respectable specs too. Certainly enough to play around with small local models.

[zrm]

"When you thrash them" is kind of the issue. There are ten year old business desktops with a <10W idle power consumption. If your use for it is to have something to rsync files to and host your personal website and the like, even old hardware is going to average 99% idle. There is no meaningful power savings from newer hardware unless you're consistently putting it under significant load.

Some of the newer hardware is actually worse because the idle power consumption of PCs since around 2010 is determined in significant part by the low-load efficiency of the power supply. Brand new machines with the wrong power supply can use several times as much power at idle as ten year old machines with the right power supply. Annoyingly, power supply efficiency at idle is rarely documented so the only thing to do is measure it.

[jrockway]

Kind of a random aside, but I never realized how obnoxious LEDs were until I got a studio apartment and started sleeping in the same room as my homelab / workstation / networking hardware. Electrical tape saved me, but wow. You sure can produce a lot of light with a milliwatt of electricity :)

(And yes, my workstation has a clear case and LED RAM. Yes, I'm an idiot. Whenever Windows applies an update late at night, I wake up if it turns back on. I don't know what I was thinking when I built that thing, but never again.)

[BLKNSLVR]

Is it even possible to buy computers these days that don't look like they're intended to be the lighting system at a rave?

[distances]

Yes it is.

[bee_rider]

I like to put a little red wax over LEDs (at least, ones that I don’t touch). That way you can still see them, but they are dimmer, and the red tint makes the light less annoying at night.

[nmeagent]

I always thought it would be low-grade hilarious to record a fairly long video of the unboxing and assembly of a ridiculously elaborate in-case LED setup, only to reveal with a straight face and at the absolute last minute that the case in question is entirely opaque.

[pseudohadamard]

Even worse are phone chargers, intended to be used next to your bed, that light up like a Christmas tree when running. Black electrical tape is great for the worst of it, but you still need a few things available to tell you the operational status, if only they'd dim them a bit.

[longitudinal93]

One of the best investments I ever made was in ordering a set of dimming LED stickers from Lightdims.com

I went throught my whole house adding them to powerbars, routers, toothbrushes, smoke detectors, etc. I even found the exact of location to put one over the motion detector on my Ecobee thermostats so they wouldn't light up everytime you walked by. I swear my house is about 1000% calmer than it would be without them.

[pseudohadamard]

Very nice, thanks! I was thinking of gluing baking paper over the most annoying LEDs as diffusers but these are much less of a kludge.

For anyone else seeing this, they ship to most countries for 99 cents so it's not the usual $29.95 for Fedex shipping on a packet of stickers. I'd seen similar ones on Aliexpress in the past but they're just light-blocking dots, not dimming ones.

[wil421]

You can buy server boards that don’t require loud fans. If you’re buying used server gear from a datacenter then it will be like what you said.

I have a 4U NAS with a supermicro board and an i3 chip with 6 WD Red NAS drives and it’s very quiet. The chassis came without fans so I installed the brand I like.

[iririririr]

no, you definitely cannot. you probably have a consumer board in a 4u case

[Gud]

Completely wrong.

[oyashirochama]

Tell my youve never owned a supermicro board without telling me. They support regular 80mm/90mm Noctua and function just fine. There's specific supermicro mounts for me.

[iririririr]

and if that is enough to move enough air, you're running consumer workloads. just have a fancy case.

[apple4ever]

Nope

[hx8]

You're right, I may have significantly over-estimated the percentage of people on hn that have dealt with server hardware. It's expensive, big, loud, power hungry and temperature sensitive.

[kevin_thibedeau]

> my 1U

1Us have the most compromised ventilation and compensate with loud fans running at high speeds.

[craftkiller]

Yeah, it certainly wasn't the quietest choice for form-factor, but the fact remains: all server grade hardware are not optimizing for noise. They are meant to be running in datacenters, not livingrooms, so noise was never a concern for them. A nice thing about consumer-grade hardware is they are optimizing for both sound and power consumption because those devices are designed to be around humans. So I certainly hope consumer-grade hardware survives.

[lambdasquirrel]

In my first job we worked in a room full of 4Us and it was always refreshing when we powered them all down for the weekend. So quiet. It’s almost like there was a reason why consumer-grade hardware existed.

[rrix2]

I have a 4U with noctua fans and the loudest part of my rack is the harddisks

[wlesieutre]

Not only the loudness, the small fans have subjectively more annoying sound even if they were the same volume. Much more shrill than a large fan.

[hvb2]

Sure. But are there actual limits on how much noise they're allowed to make?

This is all built to be put in a place where noise is not an issue

[jjav]

You can make those rackmounted servers as loud or as quiet as you like. For home, optimize quiet (and low power consumption).

Even though my server rack is in the garage I try to keep it quiet. A couple of them are fanless Atom-based and others have fans but they are built to be quiet. If you need hardware that generates a lot of heat, go with 4U for large fans that spin slow, thus low noise.

The "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet" happens when you stuff a lot of heat generation into a 1U chassis that then requires lots of tiny fans running at full speed. Those you don't want at home! But it is easy to avoid. Data centers do this to maximize density, but that's unlikely to matter at home.

[coldtea]

>Atom-based

Not exacty enterprise grade servers then?

[favorited]

Supermicro sells Atom-based SKUs with enterprise features like a BMC+IPMI, 10Gb SFP+ ports, ECC memory, SFF-8087 ports, chassis intrusion detection, etc.

[pseudohadamard]

And do you need a full-on enterprise-grade server? Given the choice between a 1U server whose fans even at minimal utilisation can still be heard three doors away and something with a low-power/laptop-grade CPU that does the same job silently and with little power use, I'll take the latter.

[coldtea]

>And do you need a full-on enterprise-grade server?

I might not, but this subthread was about them, wasn't it?

[jjav]

Not quite, this thread was about encouraging people with interest in open hardware to have a home server rack.

That said, it's not clear here what people in the thread even mean by "enterprise grade". Some of the commenters seem to assume "enterprise grade" is defined solely by how loud it is. That's not the definition.

Enterprise grade simply means top quality hardware such as Supermicro boards, ECC RAM and quality components built for 24x7 use for many years. Some of it is enterprise-y features like remote management which is fun, but hardly necessary at home. I do admit it is fun to access the remote management console of my rack servers from my home office, although clearly I don't need it since I can walk 30 seconds down to the garage and access the console directly. But of course a home rack is something to be done for fun, so fun counts as a feature.

[pseudohadamard]

> Some of the commenters seem to assume "enterprise grade" is defined solely by how loud it is. That's not the definition.

It's not?

Isn't it like enterprise grade software which is anything that costs over $50,000, sprays its files all over the filesystem, takes half a dozen full-time IT admins round the clock to keep it running, and has more bugs and 0day than an undergraduate student assignment?

[gck1]

I sit next to my 4U server with all enterprise components apart from fans - these are consumer grade.

I had to mod the chassis slightly (with just pliers, tape and random inserts) to fit these fans in there, and add fans in front to push the air in. The PSU that came with it was obnoxiously loud, but thankfully, Supermicro has a quiet version that I can't even hear. Even if SM didn't have this PSU, I could have easily modified the PSU and fit some noctuas in there without any issue or safety concerns - like I did with my enterprise grade Mikrotik switch that also had obnoxious fans by default.

I even have an enterprise grade UPS that is dead silent when it's not running on battery power (I swapped the fans there too).

I essentially try to buy enterprise gear whenever possible. Not only is it usually much better than the consumer alternative, but it also is frequently much cheaper too because of second hand market. Before AI sucked the soul out of the hardware market in general, you could have bought enterprise SSDs that had life expectancy - TBW - measured in petabytes, and MTFB - practically never - for half the price of the top consumer SSD that had TBW measured in tens of TB and MFTB of yesterday.

And the entire rack is just slightly more louder than the PC I was using.

The only consumer grade computer at my home is my MacBook and my phone.

[lmz]

Enterprise SSDs are all that. Just make sure you power it up. For data retention without power the requirements are 3mo for enterprise vs 1yr for consumer grade.

[ghaff]

I built PCs for a number of years and then I shifted to some combinations of RPis, MacBooks, and (maybe) Mac Minis. It was a (long) phase that involved quite a bit of money as well as frustration oftentimes but almost certainly not going to do it again.

[pseudohadamard]

I had exactly this problem, 1U server that sounded like a 747 taking off downwind. I solved it by getting a mini-PC that had more processing power than the eBayed 1U server (I just looked up what was available in terms of CPUs and got the best bang per buck, an 8C16T AMD CPU) and that runs essentially silent except when it's under load - they're designed for low-power/silent operation. If you're running your server at 100% load 24/7 then this isn't for you, but for home "server" use it was ideal.

[varispeed]

This. At one company we ran out of space in the server room, so the excess machine temporarily landed next to my desk. Dear god. Noise cancelling headphones couldn't cope with the noise.

[etrautmann]

I had to provision a 1U server in grad school. Turing that thing on in the office was a joke. Completely impossible to work with it on if you were anywhere in that part of the office.

[techpression]

Reminds me of when I as a kid got one of those Delta 7000rpm fan powered cpu coolers, my mom promptly asked what it would cost to make that noise (that was heard in the entire apartment) go away. Got a Zalman (back when they were great) and everything was good.

It was a learning experience, and I think everyone should experience that kind of industrial noise at least once to appreciate how quiet consumer hardware is.

[pseudohadamard]

I remember a review from back then which contained the phrase "strap on the 7000rpm from hell". Those Delta's definitely weren't quiet.

[lovich]

If you’re living in an apartment I definitely could it seeing being non viable, but if you’re in a house I don’t think it’s a big deal.

Every house I’ve lived in has had machinery for water pumping and heating and we just put our server along with them.

[Gud]

If you build your own servers you can make them silent.

I had a 2U Xeon beast I kept water-cooled. Before I installed the water cooling, a bit noisy and 60C. Afterwards, total silence and 30C.

[aidenn0]

A 4U case is basically just a midsized tower with rack ears (or rails).

A 1U case runs the gamut in noise from vacuum to jet-engine.

[lazylizard]

and i dont know whats the reliability gain from consumer to "server" hardware. 1 x 9? hot plug power supplies? definitely more ram slots i guess...

meanwhile..i see axiomtek industrial computers that dont even have a power button sold with 7yr warranties..