Cheap/small/low energy home server

airzone on 21/02/2014 - 22:08

Hi Guys,

I'm looking to set up a home server. It will need to run Windows of some sort and will have some sort of SQL server… In addition, it will need to serve a small lightly used file share. Ideally, it should be a low power option, quiet, small, and cheap.. It will run headless.

I have a few 120gb SSD's lying around unused (sigh @ first world problems) so ideally I could utilise one or two of these.

I saw some of the HP Microserver / Intel Nuc deals going on, but I don't think that a Celery CPU has enough kick (so many problems in the first world :/ )…

On the flip side, I can get my hands on some oldish Dell R710's, but they are neither small, quiet or low power. And the missus probably won't let me set up a rack in my apartment. But they will run Windows Server + SQL Server fine… So it's very tempting. (more first world problems… sigh)

Any thoughts?

Computing

Comments

  • tds on 21/02/2014 - 22:24

    I know this isn't windows but I run Raspberry pi nas/Usenet /torrent/ dlna works great

    • airzone on 21/02/2014 - 22:43

      It's more about for application development to have something small and capable of running my databases + storing source code just in case my dev machine has a problem. My wife's PC acts as the home media server / sabnzbd / her game machine..

      • Abaddon on 09/04/2014 - 12:33

        Don't know whether you got this sorted out but have you considered an Azure machine you could spin up when you need it?

        If it's mainly for storing source code there is also Visual Studio Online/Team Foundation Service. It's free for up to 5 users and there are (or were, I haven't looked in a while) no storage limits

  • comphelp on 21/02/2014 - 22:42

    What about the NUC with and i3 or i5 instead of the Celery?

  • mskeggs on 21/02/2014 - 23:10

    Bet you could buy a laptop with a smashed screen on eBay cheap.

    • nevbuster on 22/02/2014 - 08:53

      I did similar thing. My wife's old laptop had a broken hinge that was part of the body and could not be fixed. So I superglued the hinge so it's permanantly open but holds and now its a great server.

  • scotty on 22/02/2014 - 08:38
    +1

    I am actually using a Microserver N54L as semi-development box at home. Yes it's a bit slow even comparing to my laptop running first gen i5, but forces me to optimise :)

    Otherwise Intel NUC i3/i5 probably match the requirement of small & quiet.

  • fruit on 24/02/2014 - 12:36
    +1

    mac mini?

    • scotty on 24/02/2014 - 12:53

      Come to think of it, it's actually quite a sensible suggestion.

      i5 current-gen MacMini would be less than $650 (during those regular 10% off DSE/JB sales), with full voltage mobile CPU (not the ULV stuff in NUC), RAM and HDD already included just need to install Windows to run Visual Studio. Heaps on cheap second hand ones on eBay as well.

  • measles03 on 09/04/2014 - 14:44

    Gen 8 Microserver and throw a Xeon in it!

    • lasertip on 09/04/2014 - 17:42

      Or just get an entry level small business Dell/HP server with a xeon core for 1-2k

  • mattyman on 15/04/2014 - 15:37

    I'd skip Windows and use FreeNAS. For what you need, Windows is overkill.

    I bought an n54l a while back which I run FreeNAS off of. I whacked 4 3TB drives in it (1 drive redundancy) added 16gb RAM and it does the job. I get transfer rates of up to 80MB/sec.

    You won't need all of that though (unless you eventually want to run sabnzbd off of FreeNAS - I think it also has plugins for Sickbeard, Plex and some other tools you might find useful, if you ever decide to move that role from your wife's PC). The server came with 2GB RAM and no drives, you just need to plug in your drives, pick up a fast USB stick, whack FreeNAS onto that and plug it into the internal USB port (the drive FreeNAS is installed on cannot be used for anything else) and you've got yourself a fairly reliable storage solution.

    FreeNAS also lets you create application jails. You can easily create an Ubuntu jail and install MySQL on that. It'll appear on your network with it's own IP address.

    If you get a NUC you'll probably be forced to use USB to store your files (not a very safe option IMO as with such old drives the potential for them to fail will be fairly high). You could always go for one of the NUCs with the combined 2.5 SATA and mSATA options, though.

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