Will this be overkill or otherwise not recommended for someone who is new and just starting to learn?
My goal is to have something I can grow into, but initially I’d like to host a few VMs, game servers, and a have place to store content. I’d also like to host a PLEX server in the future as well but might buy a separate piece of hardware for it specifically down the road. Thanks in advance for taking the time to help a newbie!
That’s going to be noisy as hell.
go for it, get a rack with wheels, 20 odd Kilos is a pain in the ass to move about in that form factor.
it’ll only be noisy on start up.
If you buy purpose built enterprise gear be mindful of the space, power and noise they produce.
All depends on what you’re looking to host. For some perspective I run a valheim server, home assistant, jellyfin media server and a handful of other applications on a 2011 mac mini i7 8 core cpu with 2 ssds using sofware raid 1 on debian. I had the ssd’s lying around and picked up the mac mini from a job site recycling a bunch of equipment but it’s quiet efficient for my use case. I have an old 2 bay qnap connected to that “server” using NFS so that adds 6TB for my Jellyfin server to store media on.
When I had an a R720, the power consumption was only 70w. How? Simple:
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Pare the machine to what you actually need. If you don’t need 40 cores, have the system run with a single CPU installed.
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Look at the how much memory is really been used. To run Linux and various Linux VMs and even a Windows one, 32GB or 48GB can go a long ways. If you load it with 384GB, great, but there will be a power penalty.
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BIOS Performance settings make a huge difference. Setting the machine to max performance will disable C states and makes for a slightly faster but very loud and power hungry server.
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Take advantage of power savings. Have the RAID controller spin down HDDs that are not being access. Energize only a single PS to cut another 10-12W off the usage.
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It’s cheap because you will pay with the power bill.
If your are a shareholder at your local power provider… Or just recicle some hardware lying around any PC, laptop ou small form factor would do the job without a portion of the noise or power consumption, just a guy that runs a similar setup once a week as a redundant backup.
Personal experience here - had both and the fan noise on these is nuts
You can write a script to control the fans.
With great power comes great electricity bill…
My whole rack (6 servers and a bunch of Cisco switching equipment.)
Uses way too much electricity.
If you want dell go with T420. It’s quiet as hell and only uses about 100W or less
Gonna be noisy
That was my initial thought as well.
$400 for that seems steep. Go look for an HP Z440 workstation as cheap as possible and upgrade it. A 12 core E5 v4 cpu is literally $5 and you should be able to pickup a chassis with cpu and like 8gb ram for ~$120. Then for $10 a stick but as many 16gb ddr4 ecc dimms as you want.
For $400 or less you could get 12 much faster newer cores, a basically silent workstation that idles under 100w and 192gb ddr4
Check the processor generation for H.265 / HEVC compatibility, I had an older HP G8 and it needed to fire up 20+ cores just to transcode a 300Mb anime
Despite what other people are saying, the noise on these depends on your bios settings. If you set everything for high performance, it’s going to be loud. I’d start off with the energy saving settings until you decide you need more power. With mine set to energy saving, because it’s honestly more power than I need right now with 16 cores; 32 threads; 176 GB RAM and (4) 6 TB hard drives for storage (not including boot drives), the server is actually very quiet. It’s quieter than my PowerConnect 6248P POE switch. I’d say it’s a great server for starting off with if you can get a good deal on it. I run VMWaee ESXI with multiple virtual machines, TrueNAS; pfSense; Plex; VMWare VCSA and a couple of others for just playing around with different operating systems when I need to. Even with power saving settings, I have no performance issues with anything I do as a home server. Now, in a production environment, data center, corporate server running critical tasks, I would never choose power saving settings. But for most people, it’s not likely you will need the full performance of something like this in a home environment. And, if you start using more of the processor, or have it in a room that’s not air conditioned on a warm day, it will automatically increase fan speed as needed anyway. Not that I recommend a room without temperature and humidity control of some kind, but it can handle it to an extent when not in a live production environment.