Not sure why this doesn’t exist. I don’t need 12TB of storage. When I had a Google account I never even crossed 15GB. 1TB should be plenty for myself and my family. I want to use NVMe since it is quieter and smaller. 2230 drives would be ideal. But I want 1 boot drive and 2 x storage drives in RAID. I guess I could potentially just have 2xNVMe and have the boot partition in RAID also? Bonus points if I can use it as a wireless router also.
All of those HP minis have 2 NVMe slots. If you’re looking for more bays maybe a QNAP TBS-h574TX (Core i3-1320PE) will bit your needs better. Or the Asustor Flashstor 6 FS6706T.
One other possible approach to this is to go with the 800 G4 or the 800 G6 as they also SATA port you can use for your boot drive.
You can also boot from a fast USB 3 flash drive, since it’s your boot drive it won’t be as bad as you think. Consider some servers boot from SD Cards and other low performance media with almost static images.
I work with real servers. SD card boot media is generally a bad idea. VMware officially semi-deprecated it a while back. Unless you tune your install to redirect typical I/O to the durable drives (which is going to be a pain, having to find and reconfigure all those services), typical logging to disk and various temp files are going to wear it out pretty quickly.
I would just use two drives and not separate the OS. That way, you also don’t have to worry about the OS drive failing and taking down the server.
Just be careful if you reinstall. I’d suggest deleting the OS partitions first, then reinstalling to the empty space, instead of trusting the installer to do it properly.
Obviousy :)
I appreciate the suggestion but these are not N100 PCs. I’m looking for something in the $200-300 range. Those are just complete overkill for my purposes.
I do like the idea of using USB drives for storage, though…
I wholeheartedly don’t.
Not even for the OS?
Nope.
Just waiting for failure in my experience.
You can get those machines second hand for the price range you specified.
About the USB storage, just be careful about what OS you’re running. It is very important that you to manually configure the system not to write logs and other crap to the flash storage OR… you can pick something like Armbian (yes it does have a x86 version) that is already tweaked to run on SD card and other kinds of flash.
If cheap USB flash isn’t performant enough maybe a USB SSD of some kind (there are some that are NVMe) will most likely work you. Anyway don’t forget that USB may disconnect when pushed around and it can become a issue.
I frankly wouldn’t run anything over USB because it is painful but it is an option. Maybe make a solid case for your mini computer and the hard drive and bolt everything down into place.
Maybe but they also presumably consume much more power?
If you pick one of those machines with a “T” CPU you won’t even notice them. They’ll downscale on idle to probably around the same power the N100 would. The real difference is that they’ll use more power if you demand more resources but even that that point do you really care about a few watts?
Before anyone loses their minds, imagine you get the i3-8300T model that will peak at 25W, that’s about 0.375$ a month to run the thing assuming a constant 100% load that you’ll never have.
Even the most cheap ass cloud service out there will be more expensive than running that unit at 100% load. People like to freak about power consumption yet it’s not their small mini PC that ruins their power bill for sure.
Power doesn’t cost the same everywhere
Yes, I’m in Europe with this Ukrainian/Russian mess whatever you’re paying I can assure you I’m paying more than most people reading this and you don’t see me freaking out about a mini PC. Even if you multiply everything above by 4 (and that will certainly go over wtv someone is paying right now) you’ll sill be talking about a very little money compared to everything else you’re running in our houses.
Not sure how you came to that conclusion, but even in places with very cheap electricity, it does not even come close to your claimed $0.375 per month. At 25 W you would obviously consume about 18 kWh per month. Assuming $0.10/kWh you’d pay $1.80/month. In Europe you can easily pay $0.30/kWh, so you would already pay more than $5 per month or $60 per year.
Just used cpubenchmark.net.
they consume 8-10W