
Ask HN: What's a good cheap, low-power, high-flexibility home server solution? - kqr
I want to get a server to stick under the TV, which will automate some of my life.<p>I&#x27;m a Linux power user and software developer, but my hardware skills suck. I can stick together computer parts with matching interfaces, but that&#x27;s about it.<p>In my search for something cheap (being a CS student), I tried thinking out of the box. Since Linux or NetBSD runs on pretty much anything, it shouldn&#x27;t be a big deal to look for things people don&#x27;t normally think to?<p>There are some ideas I have had and then ruled out. I&#x27;d love nothing more than to be wrong about all of them. These are:<p>* Commercially available NAS solutions: not flexible enough in terms of software you can run on them.<p>* Raspberry Pi and similar one-chip computers: bad I&#x2F;O performance.<p>* Old laptops: batteries not meant for constant load.<p>* Used rack server: noisy and power hungry. Might be able to take out some fans and undervolt it but I lose stability at that point.<p>* Most disappointing: smartphone ARM SoCs. They&#x27;re amazing but tricky and expensive to turn into general purpose computers.<p>I&#x27;m aiming to have one SSD for most day-to-day usage, mainly for its quietness and low power consumption. In addition, I want two slow spinning drives in RAID-1 for backups; the idea is that these will be parked for the majority of the time. I&#x27;m worried about power consumption not for my electricity bill as much as for heat and efficiency concerns.<p>I need it to fit in a small case, and upgradeability is not an issue as long as &quot;replace everything&quot; is a possible upgrade path (i.e. I want to avoid vendor lock-in). External connections can be limited. If I get a gigabit ethernet port and ideally also an HDMI output I&#x27;m content.<p>I hope these are fairly general demands and we can get a discussion going on modern, cheap, unusual home server&#x2F;HTPC solutions!
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oblib
My advice is to get a Raspberry Pi and tinker with it and don't worry about
the low I/O performance. There are some good reasons to go this route.

One of the best is the amazing support the community around it offers. Another
is the existing software that's available now to do what you want.

And... not too long ago the Raspberry Pi Foundation made their "Raspbian OS"
available to run on both Mac and PC hardware. So you've got a solid path to
upgrade your hardware if you feel it's not fast enough for.

A used Mac Mini might be a great choice. Small, quiet, low power consumption,
and plenty fast enough. I'm still using my late `09 Mac Mini as my dev work
box. I maxed out the RAM to 8GB and installed an SSD drive with 350GB of
storage a couple years ago and it runs great.

My plan is to install Raspbian on it when Apple obsoletes it and they're in
the process of doing that now.

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bobstaples
I bought a cheap dell fx160 thin client (€50 @ 4gb RAM) has no HDMI but works
well as a low power home server

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bartvk
Yep, I second something like this. I bought a little PC with an Intel Atom
330, and I use it for CrashPlan and as a little file server. With a small SSD
and a large harddrive, it works great. Excluding storage cost me around 60
euros.

