My use case is a homelab kubernetes cluster, so I want multiple nodes for redundancy, but I don’t want to use too much electricity or generate too much heat. But for the sake of other readers, let’s keep it general:
What’s a nice little computer for a homelab, with its own power supply, ethernet, and room for 2 internal disks?
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer k8s Kubernetes container management package
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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If you have a friend in IT, see if they can grab you some old workstations when they’re decommissioned. I have several small form-factor Dell Precision workstations that fit your use case perfectly, all hand-me-downs from IT friends.
I AM a friend in IT. In my experience, retired workstations are not energy efficient. Otherwise I agree.
They’re not energy efficient when they’re working, but usually servers are idle 95% of the time.
You’ll spend more money buying new hardware than the power you save.
Refurbished Lenovo Tiny, HP micro or Lenovo mini are the go to things for this. Available in plenty different configurations, modular and widely available due to getting decommissioned by the industry in big numbers after 2-3 years.
They idle around 6-7W
Here is a good comparison list of all the different Tinys out there.
@B0rax Cool, I wish, I had seen it earlier this year, when I wanted to get the differences between some HP and Lenovo models.
Especially, how much NVMe sockets are available.If you want a lot of NVMe sockets, my recommendation would be the Lenovo M920x. It has 2 on board. Then you can add a special riser card, which gives you 2 more + a 4x PCIe slot.
Which gives you 4 NVMe slots + SATA + one 4x PCIe slot and not counting the B-Key WiFi slot which also has PCIe.
