I’m trying to start out self-hosting and was looking for some good servers. I have a budget of ~100 USD and am in the US. I was initially going to get some type of raspberry pi but they seem to always be sold out here
I’m trying to start out self-hosting and was looking for some good servers. I have a budget of ~100 USD and am in the US. I was initially going to get some type of raspberry pi but they seem to always be sold out here
I second what others are saying about finding some used mini PCs. My lab consists of server hardware mainly doing storage stuff plus some mini PCs for most services.
I use dell 7050s from amazon in mine. I used to have legit xeons 56xxx procs on super micro boards etc.
The power consumption is night and day and the sff is nice but still expandable. Totally serviceable for any workload I throw at it. I can toss 10gbe in it etc.
I tried to move to my storage onto a bunch of ODROID HC4s in a cluster of some sort, but found them to be quite unreliable. Also, needing one machine for every 2 disks was going to be a nightmare from a space (they are not space efficient or designed to be racked), networking, power (PSU and wiring), cost (~$100 per unit including overhead for networking and wiring), and management perspective. I am running 32 disks and always growing, I just bought a Supermicro JBOD that has 36 bays in 4u plus the SAS cabling and card I needed for well under the $1600 the same number of HC4s would cost.
Yeah I just use iscsi from a nas for storage. Specifically using cheaper sata SSDs.
Have considered moving to 10gbe and nvme SSDs for the bandwidth increase but the lab does fine as it tbh.