Always on low power home server

I'd stick with a RasPi. There's a process to set a boot flag to allow booting from USB media. From there you can install Raspbian (or your other distro of choice) to any USB connected storage device. I've been using the same USB drive partitioned and formatted to 1/4th its capacity (to increase available blocks for wear leveling) for 5 straight years without any issues.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

I think there is an awesome setup that many are overlooking! With a RockPro64 board, you can configure it to use SSD's, both SATA & NVMe!

RockPro64 boards: https://pine64.com/product-category/rockpro64/?v=0446c16e2e6... Accessories: https://pine64.com/product-category/rockpro64-accessories/?v...

I think these RockPro64 boards are highly underrated. I got one a while back, I was looking for something more powerful than a Raspberry pi. You can get it with 2 or 4 GB RAM.

They have PCI-e slots, so the SSD interface cards plug into the board through them. With this setup you will get full performance from your drive, instead of having to rely on a USB connection on raspberry pi & others.

SATA: https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-pci-e-to-dual-sata-ii-i... NVMe: https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-pci-e-x4-to-m-2-ngff-nv...

I've not set mine up like this yet, as I've not been doing much with my board lately except running pi-hole. But I plan on getting an NVMe interface in the future, and maybe the metal desktop casing. I think this type of setup is exactly what you're looking for. The cost is reasonable. If you get a 4GB board, a power supply, and an SATA interface you'd be all in for ~$103 before shipping.

There are lots of accessories, and tons of OS options with an easy installer. I just checked, as of writing this the are builds for (both desktop & minimal) Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, CentOS, Manjaro, Armbian debian/ubuntu, DietPi. Also other stuff like Recalbox, batocera, OpenMediaVault, ChromiumOS, or Android. I not an expert in the entire SBC market, but I'm doubt many other boards have community support for that many different OSs.

I left the RasPi behind for a 2nd hand Lenovo m93p tiny for about $100. (An alternative HW would be the Dell Optiplex 9020 micro). You can upgrade the RAM on these and they use standard SSDs.

I'm booting the Proxmox VM environment and it's currently running a VM and a LXC container, with lots of future opportunities.

Proxmox allows you to reserve a vm's access to the USB ports, which comes in handy if you want to attach a Zigbee stick to a virtualized home automation server.

If Open Hardware is something you care about, you can have a look to the different SBCs from Olimex, a Bulgarian company (https://www.olimex.com/). They care about having the SoC they use being mainline supported in the Linux kernel.

For example here : https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/Home-Server/open-s...

I have been thinking of buying one with their LiPo battery pack to have nice shutdowns in case of power failure.

I'd again recommend a Raspberry Pi (ideally 4 with 4GB+ RAM), but with some modifications.

- You can choose an high endurance MicroSD card to maximize its life.

- You can delegate big file storage to something external (a HDD or SSD w/USB 3.0 connection). If you want something small, SanDisk Extreme Pro USB stick is a real SSD with USB-SATA bridge inside and 400MB/sec throughput.

- Armbian writes logs and swap to RAM in a compressed manner and will only commit logs back to disk during restart/shutdown. You can modify Raspbian to do the same I think. Armbian is not present for Raspberry Pi, my bad, sorry.

I'm using Armbian on a OrangePi Zero to run dnsmasq, qbittorrent (humble bundle downloads and ISOs), syncthing and other couple of services. I've delegated storage to an external USB 256GB drive and it's doing fine for now.

It's not as powerful to run Kodi and other multimedia stuff, but it's a plug and forget matchstick box which makes my life way easier.

Intel NUCs or similar clones Lenovo ThinkCenter Tiny or HP ProDesk Mini are good candidates. They are not worth their retail price but are often sold very cheaply on second-hand markets like eBay. I have one. Very quiet things and can handle a dense amount of workloads. Memory, storage and mini PCI devices are all upgradeable.

These things consume around less than 8W at idle, so obviously they are not as low power as the RPi. But if you need to handle a lot of beefy services on the same machine then the power-performance ratio of these machines may be more attractive.

What's your budget?

My home server is mainly a file server and automated backup server. I also use it to host dedicated servers for some games my friends and I play (minecraft, KSP dark multiplayer, halo ce, etc.). It does PiHole and steam/origin/blizzard/uplay download caching (steam game install from a bonded dual-10G server is fun) as well.

I picked up a SuperMicro mini-ITX 8 core Xeon-D based server board on eBay for ~$400. The idle power is <10W and it runs off 12V DC and has dual 10G ethernet, 6 SATA ports, IPMI, A x16 PCIe slot, and an x4 M.2 slot.

With 6x 10 TB WD Red drives and 2 NVMe disks it pulls about 25W at idle (mostly the drives). If I wanted to run the Kodi or Plex on demand video transcoding I'd probably throw a used quadro in there (or, hack around the transcode limit on a GeForce card).

My favorite platform is PC Engines APU 2. Consider something like the apu2e4 with its aluminum case and a msata card. I turn them into routers, media servers, Bitcoin nodes, etc. More expensive than Pies but I’ve had great success with them.

https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

They're not low cost new, but there's a decent number of used Intel NUCs available on eBay and similar sites. They're standard PCs with low power components, so you can stick SSDs and other things into them easily. Since it's Intel platform it's also easier to power manage them with standard tools. Powertop can flip the graphics output, audio, etc. off independently and scale frequency.

I used a Raspberry Pi for this for a long time and did fry a couple of SD cards along the way. A few years ago, the last time the SD card died, I decided that instead of buying a USB SSD for it I’d get a used Lenovo Thinkcentre “Tiny”, which has been great.

They are readily available from corporate IT liquidators on eBay. Mine was $100 and came with a Core i5, 250GB SSD, 8GB of memory. I’ve read about people swapping Xeons into them as well. It uses more power than a Pi but is still basically silent. Overall I’ve found it to be perfect for the things you’re talking about.

Try a Nuc 11 with an Akasa turing.. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16191/akasa-turing-fanless-ca... slap in 64GB ram and a 1TB SSD Run proxmox .. boom silent homelab that sits in the living room behind the TV ..

Lots of old laptops out there for cheap if not free. Many of them are quiet and low power with the added bonus of having a built in UPS.

I'm using the cheapest Synology NAS (DS119j) paired with an SSD. It runs between 10-5 watts.

However it might be a bit limited in terms of computing power to run Kodi and all the other uses you want in parallel.

It has a fan but I have never heard it make any noise.

So depending on your needs it could be an easy "setup and forget" kind of box.

For the price of RPi (or less!) you can buy a second-hand thin client which will have much more robust storage options and easy expandability.

Some recommendations: HP T520/T620, Fujitsu Futro S520/S720, Wyse Dx0Q

https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t520/ https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/Futro/s520/ https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/d/dx0q/

You can use a USB enclosure + drive with a Raspberri Pi, e.g. [1] [2]

If you plan on something more CPU intensive (e.g. running VMs), another option that looks interesting is the System76 Meerkat [3]

1. https://www.amazon.com/SSK-Aluminum-Enclosure-External-Based...

2. https://www.amazon.com/Blue-NAND-1TB-SSD-WDS100T2B0B/dp/B073...

3. https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat

I use a DFI EC700-BT! It's been so awesome I've wanted to plug them forever but haven't found a chance! So thanks for this thread!

Fanless, ECC ram, space for a drive inside but I have it attached to a usb disk tower. I got it a handful of years ago so I'm sure it's aged, but I regularly stream video from it over an SSH tunnel. It has two ethernet ports too!

And the coolest part: I was having an issue with booting due to my buggy usb disk array, and it was a pain to move it over to my desk to attach a screen to troubleshoot. I contacted DFI support and asked if they could enable console port boot, and they built and sent me a new bios image to flash with the console port boot feature!

I run a Ubiquiti UDM Pro as the router for my home network and slapping a few additional containers (it uses podman) on top like pi hole is doable e.g. using https://github.com/boostchicken/udm-utilities

I use it for pi hole and rclone backups.

It’s not exactly great as a home server if you want total freedom/control but it has a decent ARM SoC, a swappable 3.5“ drive bay and even though it’s got a fan I can’t hear it .

I only use it because it’s obviously running anyway and that was the least expensive way to add some things I wanted to my local network.

Try Rpi once again with external ssd[1], preferably with external power source like psu[2]. Rpi has huge community which will help you if you ever need solution for bespoke config

[1]https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/im-booting-my-raspber... [2]https://superuser.com/questions/1239449/using-a-separate-pow...

I don't really understand why Plug Computers [1] didn't catch on a lot. A decade and a half later and hardly made a dent. Super things, very simple to use, just plug it in and leave it running. A decade and a half however is a long time and they've not come far other than getting bigger and less able to compete on features with new offerings. Perhaps the horse has left the stable on these.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_computer

How about an x86-64 that runs just whatever your favorite flavor of linux is?

In particular the Hardkernel ODROID-H2+. It's got 2x2.5G ethernet ports (and optionally 4 more), M2/nvme, 2 SATA, and 2 dimms (max 32GB ram).

It's not particular power hungry (max TDP of the J4115 is 10 watts), if your needs change the extra ram could be quite handy.

Should be fine for router duty, firewall, network service, plex/kodi, even light NAS duty. It's got way more CPU than the RPI and clones, avoids ugly things like network or storage over USB, yet generates minimal heat/noise.

You can use a older possibly partially broken laptop with low TDP CPU. Put the guts in a larger PC case or something similar. You can calculate what kinda heat sink you need that works without fan or pick a fan-less device. You still need a bit air flow so the case must be open enough or has fans depending on the CPU and size. The last time I did this was several years ago and It was running 24/7 for about 2 years without any problem. A Laptop alone likely would dies someday because the fan dies. On idle the my whole system inclusive power supply was burning less than 10 watts.

But there are far far more efficient CUPs noways. You basically have the last 10 years of mobile CPUs to find something that does exactly what you need. Some older CPUs you can get almost for free. If you need something newer (with 4k video HW rendering an stuff) you may get a good dead with broken stuff. especially display and keyboard can be broken since you wont need them. make sure it has the IO you need especially RJ45 are sometimes missing on the very slim new devices Be aware that some devices can not be turned on without keyboard attacked! Either because the bios doesn't like it or more likely because the power on button is on the keyboard so an USB keyboard wont work! Also auto boot after power-lose may not be possible because some bios just do not have that option. So make sure you know exactly what you need first.

DO NOT (AB)USE THE LAPTOP BATTERY AS UPS. The battery will die within months if its always connected and all you get is a potential for a house fire.

Intel NUCs are pretty good if you want something a bit more powerful than a Pi. Very small form factor and low power usage. Low-end ones start at about $180[1]. There are also kits for a bit less if you want to supply the SSD and RAM.

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...

I’ve been running a pair of BeagelBone Black SBCs for this for years. The one I just retired to replace with the current model had been running nearly continuously since 2014. (Powered down to move — twice — and for power outages here and there.) It's anecdotal, but my experience so far is that the onboard eMMC seems faster and is less corruption-prone than SD cards.

I use a Raspberry Pi as a low-power website server and as a UPS controller. It has a heavy-duty heat-sink without a fan and runs consistently at around 39 degrees. Its power source is the UPS that it controls.

But I specifically used a slightly-slower high-endurance micro-USB card to prevent overuse wearing-out of the card. [I also use these same cards in my dash-cam.]

The cards I use are made by Sandisk, but no doubt other companies make them too. The ones I have are white, probably to distinguish them from 'normal' cards.

While I haven't had any problems at all in using these cards, their slightly slower speed makes them look like a 'fail' using the raspberry pi testing app.

A couple of options:

NanoPC-T4[0] is based on RK3399, with a big.LITTLE CPU (Dual-Core Cortex-A72, Quad-Core Cortex-A53) with 4GB RAM, supports NVMe and a fanless configuration.

ODROID-HC4[1] is based on Amlogic S905X3, with a Quad-Core A55 and 4GB RAM (no WiFi, only 1G Ethernet) and two SATA ports, which make it well suited for entry-level NAS.

[0] http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPC-T4

[1] https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-hc4/odroid-hc4

I've used a few cheap Chinese "mini PC" as found on Amazon. The model with an Atom quad core is fine for light uses (and with the built in dGPU can hardware encode with Plex, albeit not h265 10bit).

The current one I have is an Ace PC with a Pentium Quad Core - it does have a fan, but it hardly ever comes on, and it has 2.5" sata drive support in addition to the 120GB eMMC flash on board. I've got a 1TB 860 Evo in there and it's a fine lightweight server for file storage, plex, nextcloud and InfluxDB which is monitoring the various routers and computers on the network.

Late posting but I'll leave this here anyway. Mainly so I can point others as needed.

Raspi is actually the answer. Use better sd cards. Or consider making the root fs readonly and put the other changing data on usb external storage. Even an external harddisk.

Give it the ability to turn other machines on/off as needed. I have a pi that is always on and orchestrates all sorts of little tasks. Some of them require plenty of writes. I havent burnt through a SD card yet.

NFS/samba fs mounts to allow the pi to upload to a server. Etc.

You'd be surprised how much just one pi can do. I certainly was.

Just replaced my rpi with a 10th gen nuc. It’s not fanless. It’s pretty quiet and power use wise it’s sipping under 10W when idle (which is obviously most of the time). I run proxmox on it and a couple of VMs with home assistant etc.

I looked at SBCs but getting something that had a well built case and reliable passive power supply, gigabit/WiFi/Bluetooth/nvme and also manages a high peak workload (recompiling kernels etc) without breaking a sweat at ~$3-400 is hard to beat.

I'm running a synology 6 bay nas which in addition to hoarding data and time machine backups, its running pihole in a docker container, plex server for the kid's movies, and a linux vm for little python scripts and a mqtt server. I haven't run home assistant on it yet, but I think it should be able to handle it. Plenty of folks warned me that it lacked the computing power but for my purposes it has been pretty great.

I have an always on HP ELITEDESK 800 G2 - I5-6500 3.20GHZ with an SSD. Uses about 20w. I recently measured power consumption over a few weeks. I unplug the monitor which saves a few watts.

I love the Pi but it is not a server. My best experience of Pi is when the Pi does one thing e.g. uses rsync/rclone to back up all my data to an encrypted usb disk.

Also, the box has built-in kvm/vnc which is handy as I need a ladder to get to it in my roofspace

I have a small Atom powered BeeLink (or something like that). I switched it from Windows to Xubuntu and added a large external SSD in addition to the 64BG eMMC. I have it running a few security cams.

I like it. It's been stable and has enough power to outdo the Pi (multiple cameras plus web interface) while still being low enough power that I can run it off a battery backup for a while in the event of brief power outages.

I would recommend low-end intel. You get things like a clock with a battery, a power switch, transcoding, and many distributions.

Zotac makes some nice fanless machines that take an ssd, and they run linux fine. They come with a vesa/wall mount

They can be very low cost, for example the zotac zbox ci325 or ci329 ~ $160-170 (add memory + ssd). You can pay more all the way up to fanless i7 machines.

The Rockchip SoCs are quite good. Pine64 has several boards, here is one of them, https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/02/16/pine64-unveils-quart...

Either eMMC or M.2 or SSD should be fine.

Check out reddit.com/r/homelab

I personally don't think fanless cuts it. I have an APU2 as router but don't try to use it for anything that needs CPU.

I have a Asus Ryzen PN50 as a container host for home services like media, shares, backups.

It's relatively low power, it's worth its price but it has a fan. So I keep this on a shelf in a closet out of the way.

If you do decide to give the pi another chance, move the root partition to an ssd and avoid the SD card woes. Or, boot from a USB device and have no sd card at all on the Pi 4. Both work well and a cheap option as you probably already habe all the stuff.

You've still got a load of wires to deal with though (unless you shell out for a fancy case).

Slap an SSD in an external USB enclosure, connect it to a Pi 4 configured to boot from USB, and you're all set.

I run Alpine Linux in Diskless Mode on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. Diskless means it loads the OS from SD-card into RAM on boot and then runs from there, preventing wear. I use USB for writable storage only for the (few) applications I run that require it. It suffices as a basic NAS and consumes very little power.

I’m also interested! It would also be great if knowledgeable people comment on cheapest options. RPi options typically end up around $100. There once was the CHIP computer for $10 that included storage, wifi (but not ethernet), for example, but not anymore. Quantity has a quality of its own and all that...

The RPi 4 with an external USB SSD drive should last a while and the SD card won’t wear out as fast if you’re writing to the SSD plus they have more RAM on 4th gen. I have 3 that have been running 24/7 in that configuration for a year as a Kubernetes cluster and have had 0 issues.

Can someone explain to me the use case of a home server? I've always enjoyed tinkering with RPis, but have never found a good enough reason to keep one running 24/7 as a server. PiHole seems to be the best use case for it, but uBlock Origin or Wipr handles ad blocking for me.

I ran into similar issues when using Rpi with SD cards, but I switched to a bootable SSD and had zero issues since.

If you don't like tinkering with your Rpi I can also recommend the Odroid C4: it has a better GPU and a native eMMC connector so you don't have to fiddle around with SD cards.

HP t620 PLUS. Ignore what the manufacturer says, it'll run 32GB RAM. I have a USB3 card in mine for more hard drives. ESXi with 5 VMs running all the time. Power consumption is like 6-12W for the base unit, plus whatever your drives and cards add.

Or use a Pi4 with USB disks.

I use a mini-ITX board (GA-C1007UN), which has an embedded Celeron CPU and two GbE ports. It serves me for almost five years now as a home server, router and Wi-Fi access point. The downside is that it requires an ATX power supply and is not completely silent.

2nd hand ThinkPad. Rock solid, usually silent, with battery backup, keyboard and display.

Relatively low power, compared to a modern desktop, even though multiples of power consumption of an RPi, but refurbished PCs from the previous decade do often have a good utility function for their price.

Sounds like you want pretty much any couple-generation-old laptop.

Get an older Mac mini. Been my file server for 5 years now.

Not super low cost, but I've been happy with my Synology DiskStation.

It's a NAS device that can act as a general-purpose Linux server.

Install Docker and you're off to the races.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html

Maybe a NUC 8i3 with an aftermarket fanless case?

Deskmini with a low end pentium and an arctic 12lp.

its inaudible (I am sensitive) below 800rpm.

with ram and ssd you are at around 250 bucks.

I have an old NUC5 but its fan is whiny.

rpi can now boot from ssd via usb. but i would recommend against using rpi.

cheap, used nuc or dell / hp mini pc would be better. the power usage difference is negligible

i have few NUCs at home (5) + few rpi (3) and while it works, the support for ARM is still bad.

https://i.imgur.com/TQ0VnDJ.png

I use a NUC running ESXi and it’s superb. Generally it’s pretty silent if VMs are idle, which is 95% of the time.

my rpi boots from an old usb flash drive. It is slow, disk write is 2MB/s, but it is pretty stable so far.

But next time i will probably buy something from https://wiki.debian.org/CheapServerBoxHardware

Modern pi4 can boot from other media. The Sd card problem is mostly a thing of the past.

Ise a mechanical HD instead of an SSD/CF then you get back the reliability.

I happened to be in the same situation recently :) I'll list everything, in case other people find it useful.

If you want to go really low power, ARM is probably the best choice. The smallest choices are something like a Raspberry Pi, Ordroid C4, RockPi and the likes. Some of these have SATA-Ports, so if your only concern is SD-card corruption, this is the way to go.

For more power on ARM, the current options get expensive fast, unfortunately. There are some servers coming out, but 5 digits is probably not what you're looking for ;) The mid-range is pretty empty as well (compared to x86), but you can go with a NVidia Jetson or HoneyComb LX2 [0].

When you need to have virtualisation, run proprietary software (or Kodi+Netflix, as I have found out) or run PFSense/OPNSense, you probably want to go x86. Luckily, the x86 space is not as small. The low end is filled by J1900-SoCs [1], which you can get quite cheap. The Odroid H2/+[2] is pretty powerful as well and is comparable to an RPi in size. I can highly recommend these low power boards - they consume 10-20W max, can be run with a MiniPSU [3] and yet they can provide good speed and double-digit amounts of RAM. Also, they're very cheap and even cheaper second-hand. Only drawback is that Ryzen embedded SoCs seem to be in their infancy.

If you need even more compute power, you can go for a Mini-PC. These are available in small form factors on AliExpress [4], but you can also build them yourself quite easily by choosing a MicroATX/MiniATX board and some low-power CPU, combined with a passive heat sink and a small case. These usually come with more ports than the option above, but, depending on what you put in there, the power use might go up quite a bit. It's the least expensive way to get ECC, though. Intel NUCs are also an option, but these don't come cheap.

The last option is a small desktop PC. You can easily cool it passively in a large enough case, just take a large heat sink and a low-ish TDP CPU. Modern CPUs might idle at 20-40W, so it's not that bad. Try to get a very efficient PSU and a low-feature mainboard and you should be fine. The advantages of these builds are probably the best $/performance ratio and the most variation and extendability, but at the price of comparatively high power draw.

A honorable mention goes to the Epyc Embedded [5]/Xeon D [6] SoCs. These are quite nice, providing an abundance of enterprise ports (like SFP+) and ECC in a small form factor, but they're also priced for enterprise - so, unless money is not a problem, these are probably not an option.

[0] https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/h... [1] i.e. https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-J1900N-D3V-rev-1x [2] https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h2/start [3] https://www.ebay.de/itm/Mini-ITX-PSU-120W-DC-DC-Rev-2-bringt... (for example, not this specific offer) [4] https://www.aliexpress.com/category/70803003/mini-pc.html [5] https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E... [6] https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x11sdv-16c-tp8f-revi...

I am very happy with 2 Olimex A20 Homeservers with integrated SATA SDD.

Satoshi owns about 5% of all BTC. "he" has never touched them

you can attach a SSD to a RPI, but the USB interface will make it less fast than it could be

ASRock J5040-ITX

I use a Asrock J3355B for my little nas/homeserver it idles at 8W and "spikes" to 15W while decoding movies. It's a bit pricier as a raspi but it has a lot more features. 2 Sata Ports, PCIEX Slot up to 16gb ram etc but most important it is completely silent.

For some Europeans: fly to US, buy Mac Mini with M1 chip for $699.

For some other Europeans: go to country with lax tax policy, fly to US, buy Mac Mini with M1 chip for $699.

You'd be set back by about 579 euro. In my country, the Mac Mini is 799 euro. So the difference is 220 euro. So if you wanted to visit the US, then it might be worth it.

The tricky part: figuring out how to do this legally. It's probably not possible where I live, but I'm sure some European countries are more relaxed with their import tax policies.