If anyone is looking to get started with a homelab at a good price, I can highly recommend checking ebay for a Dell Wyse 5070. They flooded the market for $50 and are likely powerful enough for many needs. They have a M.2 slot that support SATA. The 'extended' version also has space for a small pcie card and has a parallel and 2 serial ports for a blast to the past.
I built mine around an N150 board off of aliexpress. 6 SATA slots, 4x2.5G ethernet, 2x m.2 slots. Find a cheap second-hand case, a bit of RAM and you're ready to go. It's got hardware transcoding, handles 4K without breaking a sweat. And it consumes 6W!
I'm more inclined to go with N305/N355 myself for the extra compute (more images/containers). But they're a pretty decent option. I setup a "forbidden router" at a friend's using one. Been working great for his home use... proxmox, opnsense for routing, wireguard, pihole, docker-vm running his AP control software, and a trunas scale VM serving a USB hard drive for home backups.
At home, I'm using a 5900H based mini-pc I bought a few years ago and a synology nas.
For a bit more money, Optiplex Micro / Lenovo Tiny / HP Mini series with at least 8th gen i5 are a good option too. Can be found from Ebay for about 70 - 120 USD, much more powerful than Wyse 5070 while still quite power efficient (about 10W idle, as opposed to 5W of Wyse). Usually they come with one NVME, one SATA 2.5" slot, some premium models even with PCIE.
All good options, just noting that based on some searches I made they all seem to lack serial ports compared to the Wyse if that is something you care about (I personally do). There could be variants out there though with serial ports and if would be happy to hear about them and even more happy if there are fanless variants/alternatives for those of us with very limited space at home and a need to avoid noise.
I don't know about fanless, especially with an i5 as opposed to n-something.
But not all those minis are the same. G4 (intel 8th gen) and G5 (intel 9th gen) HPs are horrendous. The fan makes an extremely aggravating noise, and I haven't found a way to fix it. Bonus points for both the fan and heatsink having custom mounts, so even if you wanted to have an ugly but quiet machine by slapping a standard cooler, you couldn't.
G6 versions (intel 10th gen) seem to have fixed this, and they're mostly inaudible on a desk, unless you're compiling something for half an hour.
My Lenovo m910q Tiny has serial ports. Two of them in fact. Cost me $50 on eBay.
What if power consumption is taken into account? Are there any devices in that category that are ok to leave on 24/7 ?
I have a somewhat bigger machine that hosts my homelab, an HP 800 G2 SFF. It takes "normal" components, so can ben modified. The only custom thing is the PSU, but the standard one is good enough for my needs. Bonus points for not requiring an external power adaptor.
It has an i5-6500, 32 GB RAM (16 + 2x8 DIMMs), 2 SATA SSDs and a 2x10Gb Connect-X3. It runs 24/7 hosting OpnSense and HomeAssistant on top of KVM (Arch Linux Hardened – didn't do anything specific to lower the power draw). Sometimes other stuff, but not right now.
I haven't measured it with this specific nic, but before it had a 4x1Gb i350. With all ports up, all VMs running but not doing much, some power meter I got off Amazon said it pulled a little over 14W. The peak was around 40 when booting up.
Electricity costs 0.22 €/kWh here. The machine itself cost me 0 (they were going to throw it out at work), 35 for the nic and maybe 50 for the RAM. It would take multiple years to break even by buying one of these small machines. My plan is to wait out until they start having 10 Gb nics and this machine won't be able to keep up anymore.
Quick search online tells me ~5W for the Dell Wyse 5070, which does not sound unrealistic as I have similar boxes that draw ~10W. So, 32 to 62kWh per year and then we have ~USD 6.5 to 13 per year assuming 20 cents per kWh which another online search told me was reasonably realistic for the US.
Tangent, but it's always crazy to hear what other countries pay per kWh compared to the 0.4€/kWh in Germany.
Yeah, and Germany is expensive compared to the Nordics. 6.35 c/kWh right now in Finland, 2.54 c/kWh average over the last 30 days.
(clarification: that's euro cent, so 0.0635€ etc)
Yeah, that's pretty low. Even Denmark, right north of Germany, is paying 1/4 of what we pay.
Bay area, California: $0.61 base, $0.80 from 16:00 to 21:00.
Don't worry, there are some places in the USA that are even worse than that, like san diego, san francisco and hawaii
And in Iceland the average is around 0.07€/kWh.
Yea, I own Wyse 5070 extended, and measured around 5W from the wall when nothing attached to the PCIE slot.
Another cheap option are Fujitsu Futro's. They're meant to be thin server clients meant to operate larger server racks (I guess?). Anyway, they come with 4-8GB RAM, an SSD (most people upgrade them), and even have a PCI-e slot (depending on the model) to use with a 2.5 or 10 Gbit ethernet card, for example. Around $50 on ebay.
My eyes widened when I read $600 for a mini PC. Got my 7th gen OptiPlex for $45 and yet to use its full potential.
curious to know what you would use this for?
local dns, static site hosting, local apt cache, various other network services (unifi controller if you've got those APs for example), remote/headless dev machine (maybe not for kernel or bigcorp java development), or whatever else you want. mail if you want. Anything :)
Those little thin clients aren't gonna be fast doing "big" things, but serving up a few dns packets or whatever to your local network is easy work and pretty useful.
I use it for media hosting. Backups (connected USB disks), home assistant, syncthing
Even these low-power CPU's are surprisingly capable. As an example of more fancy thing, one could slap in some external storage, install Jellyfin, and run their own local streaming service off such a machine. The CPU is modern enough for efficient hardware transcoding of a stream.
i bought dell wyse 5070 for building talos cluster using proxmox. pretty great and you can upgrade ram to 32gb
The published technical specs indicate that the maximum RAM is 16gb (2x 8gb).
https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/pl-pl/products/thin-c...
Have you tried it with 32gb? If so, was this 2x 16gb or 1x 32gb?
I had to do a bios upgrade using Windows but a single 32gb Corsair "DDR4 SODIMM for 11th Generation Intel Core Processors" worked
I have run 2x 16GB in my 5070s with the stock bios.
I would say raspberry pi 5. cheap, small and widely used so much of the stuff is already done many times
Looking at Raspberry Pi prices inside EU, I can get 8 core laptops for a cheaper price, with display, dGPU et al.
No idea what happened, but Raspberry Pis are super expensive for the last couple years, which is why I decided to just go with used Intel NUCs instead. They cost around 80-150EUR and they use more electricity but they are a quite good bang for the buck, and some variants also have 3x HDMI or Gbit/s ethernet or m2 slots you can use to have a SATA RAID in them.
Same.. switched over during the pandemic when full on N95/100 systems were cheaper than just the RPi board by itself. More compute/ram, faster storage, included case and power, fewer headaches.
Is it better than a n100 setup from China? When you factor in the storage, power supply, case, (fan), and so on?
No. The main pain point with RPi's is that they're SD card based – which are slow and prone to failure. Configuring an SSD to be used as the main storage has also been a pain in the past (not sure if that's changed recently).
With an n100, you get a better, more upgradable system for around the same price and same power usage. On top, you will also have an x64 system that isn't limited to some ARM quirks. I made the switch n100's over a year ago and have had no issues with them so far.
Another tip: second hand gaming PCs! They can be incredibly cheap and powerful due to upgrade cycles just make sure to put a raid 1 on it as second hand gamer gear might be less reliable.
the power usage is usually horrible, which is why most don't want it
nah it basically costs nothing in contemporary power use. I metered my mid gaming pc that acts as living room media server and it's 8$/mo.