Server Hardware?

buzz, 7 months ago

Why does it say 54 comments - but I dont see any?

umulu, 7 months ago

Same for me

LainOfTheWired, 7 months ago

As someone who is also looking at building a server for different things then you( mainly nextcloud and a few other self hosted services). if you don’t need more then 2tb of storage look into a used HP mini office PC.

• They are cheap at less then £200 for an older model or even sub £100
• They are a lot more powerful then an SBC like a raspberry pi but without being an electricity consumption monster like a lot of servers
• Some have a 60W PSU so they are dirt cheap to run
• Newer ones have a 2.5 SATA slot and a M.2 slot( including the 60W model I’m looking at getting used). So you can have dual drives for a fast main drive and a backup drive or RAID depending on how you set it up
• They are small and don’t take up much room in your house like a raspberry pi
• If you need more space and it doesn’t have to be super fast you could get a USB NAS for it

So overall they are a really good option if you want something small and you don’t have a ton of money for hardware or electricity but a raspberry pi doesn’t fulfil your performance needs.

BlovedMadman, 7 months ago

I’ve gone with Unraid and consumer level hardware (intel i3 12100 and 16gb of standard ddr4 ram) the only “server hardware” I have, is an LSI HBA card that’s in IT mode so I can connect more HDDs.

I’m even used SMR drives in my array, just use a good CMR drive for parity and the biggest SSD you can get for your cache drive and you will be good to go.

TCB13, 7 months ago

Don’t get server hardware, use regular desktop/laptop machines as they’ll be more than enough for you. Server hardware is way more expensive and won’t be of any advantage. If you’re looking to buy you can even get very good 9-10th gen Intel CPUs and motherboards that are perfect to run servers (very high performance) but that people don’t want because they aren’t good to play the latest games. This hardware is also way more power efficient and sometimes even more powerful than any server hardware that you might get for the same price. Get this hardware for cheap and enjoy.

Case, 7 months ago

I’ve got enterprise level hardware, rack moubtable all that jazz.

Between the cost of power, and the heat it generates (which uses more AC and thus power) its not feasible to run it.

I’m looking into clustering some raspberry pis for a more power (and heat) efficient hardware as my next project. Barely scratched the surface of research though.

So hey, if anyone has any tips or links, it would be much appreciated.

TCB13, 7 months ago

Just out today, but probably overpriced: cnx-software.com/…/mixtile-cluster-box-supports-f…

Why not get a few HP / Dell mini computers and cluster them? Small, nice and power efficient (because there are models with “mobile” CPUs).

Case, 7 months ago

Cost and a personal bias, also I’ve seen more helpful communities amongst Linux and FOSS advocates than trying to deal with a big brand.

I’ve done a lot of IT stuff in my life, even before working in IT.

I’ve seen too many issues from big brands, and its usually caused by the company.

I have a Pi 2 from way back. I’ve thrown so many distros at that thing over time, and without fail I don’t run into any problems I didn’t personally create while learning or through human error.

I understand all too well that those big brands have support for businesses, warranties, etc. It makes them cost effective long term for business. At a personal level I just don’t see the benefits outweighing the negatives.

Again, personal bias. Same core reason I avoid apple products, bias, though I mainly dislike apples cost combined with their closed off, well, everything.

TCB13, 7 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Yes but ARM is great but compared to server hardware it is shit when it comes to performance and reliability. If you come from server hardware and you really max it out you’re going to have a poor experience.

Also I personally like to avoid the Raspberry Pi and their stuff as much as possible. They’ve done good things for the community however they’ve some predatory tactics and shenanigans that aren’t cool. Here a few examples of what people usually fail to see:

• Requires a special tool to flash. In the past it was all about getting a image and using etcher, dd or wtv to flash it into a card, now they’re pushing people to use Raspberry Pi Imager. Without it you won’t be able to easily disable telemetry and/or login via network out of the box;
• Includes telemetry;
• No alternative open Debian based OS such as Armbian (only the Ubuntu variant);
• Raspberry Pi 5 finally has PCI. But instead of doing what was right they decided to include some proprietary bullshit connector that requires yet another board made by them. For those who are unware other SBC manufacturers simply include a standard PCI slot OR a standard NVME M2 slot. Both great option as hardware for them is common and cheap;
• It is overpriced and behind times.

For what’s worth the NanoPi M4 released in 2018 with a RK3399 already had a PCI interface, 4GB of RAM and whatnot and was cheaper than the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ from the same year that had Ethernet shared with the USB bus.

If you don’t want those big brands (I only suggested them because they’re cheap second hand) build something yourself on consumer hardware or pick a Chinese brand.

Those big brands are cheap though, for 100€ you can get an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCI (m2) comes with a power adapter and more importantly it outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + bullshit pci adapter + sd card + whatever else money grab.

Side not on alternative brands, HP mini units are reliable the BIOS is good and things work. Now the trendy MINISFORUM is cool however their BIOS come out of the factory with wired bugs and the hardware isn’t as reliable - missing ESD protection on USB in some models and whatnot.

Case, 7 months ago

Performance isn’t key. But I like performance, lol. I also wasn’t aware of their more recent practices. So thank you.

I’ll have to check out the HP mini. As I said, just barely scratched the surface on researching this, and its more of a thought than a project at the moment, lol.

I just can’t afford (and cool) enterprise level stuff at home. It was free (to me) so no big loss other than buying a better CPU used ~50 bucks. I’ve spent more on worse ideas lol.

TCB13, 7 months ago

I was just trying to share a bit of my experience, I too have datacenter / server hardware experience and have dealt with a ton of mini computers and those ARMs and Chinese brands aren’t what one usually expects at the most fundamental details.

Tippon, 7 months ago

I don’t have any better hardware suggestions than you’ve already been given, but I would recommend avoiding Plex.

I get problems with it pretty much every day. Usually it’s the client stuttering and crashing, but I often get the client connecting to the server, but not getting a list of media back.

I’ve bought a lifetime licence, but I’m looking into switching to Jellyfin because it’s so frustrating.

12bitmisfit, 7 months ago

Modded minecraft servers are heavily dependent on single threaded performance. For more vanilla servers paper helps a lot. For forge I highly recommend trying mohist. It isn’t compatible with all forge mods but it works well enough that you can just replace the server jar in many modpacks and see a large performance boost.

The biggest thing that slows down mc servers in my experience is world gen. Pre generating the world and adding a world border can help a lot.

I’ve not done a larger scale fabric server so I can’t offer much advice in optimizing it but the client speed ups available through fabric look very impressive.

If you are running a server without world borders or with a lot of simultaneous players I’d look in depth on what ssd you’re saving the world to. You want dram cache, random write speeds are way more important than sequential. If you can find an Intel optane for cheap they are pretty amazing. The ssd is less important than your cpu and having enough ram to run the server.

Generally an older gaming pc is better than an older server. Again you are targeting single threaded performance. If you are purchasing hardware it might make more sense to go with lower end new hardware than higher end old hardware. It’s all about trade offs for your use case and budget. For a long time I just used my main pc to play games and host servers (ram is cheaper than another pc) but I tinker too much to keep good ‘server’ uptime.

Transcoding can get pretty taxing on a system but any semi modern quad core can handle a few 1080p streams or a 4k stream. Plus you can use a gpu for transcoding. The nice thing is it scales with core count pretty well so older server or workstation hardware works well.

Sethayy, 7 months ago

Fabric has some amazing open source projects dedicated to performance.

Idk if any multithread it yet but its my current go to for low end systems

Tippon, 7 months ago

The only thing I’d add to this is that the people who make Paper Minecraft are working on Folia, a multi threaded server. It’s probably worth looking into if you’re starting from scratch :)

aBundleOfFerrets, 7 months ago

Not terribly useful for anything less than a lot of players

whofearsthenight, 7 months ago

There are a few things I’d consider:

• How many users are going to be on the MC server? MC is pretty notorious for eating RAM, and since most of my home server adventures often includes multiple VMs, I would look for something with at least 32 gb of ram.
• for plex (I’m guessing similar is going to be the case for Jellyfin) how many users do you expect to support concurrently, and how good are you at downloading in formats that the clients support direct play for? Most remote plex users are going to require transcoding because of bandwidth limits, but if you have direct play for most of your local clients or have a good upload and don’t have to transcode 3+ streams at a time, you’re probably fine with just about anything from the last 10 years in terms of CPU.
• also re: plex, do you have any idea in terms of storage requirements? Again, if you’re just getting started < 10 tb of storage in mind, you can get by with most computers.

Anyway, to give you an idea, I run both of these and quite a few other things besides on a Dell R710 I bought like 4 years ago and never really have any issue.

My suggestion would be grab basically any old computer laying around or hit up eBay for some ~$100-$200 used server (be careful about 1u’s or rack mounts in general if noise is a concern, you can get normal tower-case servers as well) and start by running your services on that. That’s probably just about what all of us have done at some point. Honestly, your needs are pretty slim unless you’re talking about hosting those services for hundreds of people, but if you’re just hosting for you and a few friends or immediate family, pretty much any any computer will do.

I wanted to keep things very budget conscious, so I have the r710 paired with a rackable 3016 jbod bay. The r710 and the rackable were both about $200, and then I had to buy an HBA card to connect them, so another $90 there. The r710 has 64 gb of ram and I think dual Xeons plus 8 2.5" slots. The rackable is 16 3.5" slots, so what this means is I basically don’t have to decommission drives until they die. I run unRAID on the server, which also means that I can easily get a decent level of protection for drive failure, and I don’t have to worry about matching up drives and all that. I put a couple of cheap SSDs in the 710 for cache drives and to run things I wanted to be a little more performant (MC server, though tbh I never really had an issue running it on spinning disks) and this setup has been more or less rock solid for about 5 years now hosting these services for about 10 people.

aidanbell, 7 months ago

Honestly for what you’re trying to accomplish, any PC built in the past 10 years would suffice.

I’d say the bigger issue would be what server operating system you’d want to run. Personally I use UnRaid and I love it, all of the apps you mention and more are available as premade docker templates in the Community Apps plugin. I’ve tried Windows and FreeNas before but I find UnRaid just so user friendly and reliable.

spudwart, 7 months ago

IF you’re going to run your self-hosted server to run a minecraft server, get a webclient front-end. Even though it’s not FOSS and therefore a no-no with most lemmy users, AMP from Cube Coders is a great option, it starts a flat $10 fee for a permanent license. It has some fantastic features for remote backup among supporting other games.

However, if you’re a bit concerned about that there is Pterodactyl, which I’ve heard good things about, but I went with AMP because it supports other game servers like GMOD.

sam, 7 months ago

I use old thinkcentre machines, they’re cheap and are powerful enough for decent servers. I have them loaded with 16gb of RAM and 2x265gb NVME each for mirroring. They work wonderfully.

krolden, 7 months ago

And some even come with discrete gpu

zzzz, 7 months ago

Decent older servers (e.g., Dell Poweredge) can be had off of Craigslist/FB Marketplace pretty cheaply (~$300-$400).

peter, 7 months ago

They’re cheap but they’re loud, hot and use a lot of energy. So if those are an important consideration you might be better off with modern hardware

CmdrShepard, 7 months ago

OP should skip this option entirely for their use case. Regular old consumer hardware is more than adequate.

ebits21, 7 months ago

I started on a raspberry pi and would highly recommend. Great for tons of things to self host.

It’ll run Plex no problem, just forget transcoding.

Appoxo, 7 months ago

Hosting a minecraft server on a Pi is ambitious.
I tried it. Not great.

Fermiverse, 7 months ago

This is a repost from my suggestion some weeks ago:

I went for the ASRock J5040 board, 16gb ram a 500gb m.2 as system using a PCI adapter , 2x4tb ironwolf as ZFS mirror pool, 350 W power supply all in the node 304 fractal case for 550 euro alltogether.

Runs proxmox as hypervisor for VM or Container. 6 LXC running motioneye, plex, pyload with openvpn, syncthing, rclone cloud backup and openbookshelf.

Typical power usage is around 20W

That said it could also run on PicoPSU

PeachMan, 7 months ago

Buy yourself a new gaming rig, and use your old gaming rig as a server. That’s what I usually do.

Or, see if you can get an old office PC for a couple hundred bucks on eBay. Anything that’s around 5 years old (10 is pushing it) and has decent specs (maybe an i7 and 16GB of RAM) should work fine as a Minecraft and Plex server. Then you can get a cheap (ideally less than $200) graphics card and be good to go.

Bottom line, a “server” is just a PC that’s serving things. You don’t need enterprise grade hardware. If you’re new to hosting, I’d advise you to start cheap and then upgrade to better hardware in a few years when you KNOW what you need. No need to get something really nice and expensive right now.

HumanPerson, 7 months ago

I have something 10 years old for jellyfin only, (other light stuff too, not important) and it handles it fine. No hardware acceleration but the CPU can keep up for just me and 1 friend using it. I got it for 50 bucks on eBay and it rocks. I don’t know about Minecraft servers though.

Edit: It didn’t come with drives. Don’t ever trust old drives.

PeachMan, 7 months ago

It depends on whether or not you’re transcoding, how many users you have, and your resolution. If you’re just direct streaming 720p/1080p content to a couple of people then even a Raspberry Pi is fine. But if you’re sending transcoded 4K streams to several people simultaneously, you need some horsepower.

humancrayon, 7 months ago

Might I suggest Server Part Deals for drives? Excellent track record and very responsive. They are my goto for refurbished enterprise drives and have never let me down.

HumanPerson, 7 months ago

Thanks. I don’t currently have any raid or backup set up, so I should probably do that before it becomes a problem.

zeriah, 7 months ago

Buy yourself a new gaming rig, and use your old gaming rig as a server. That’s what I usually do.

Seconded. A few years ago I upgraded my CPU, which also required me to swap the motherboard and RAM. The old Mobo / CPU / RAM combo was sitting around in my closet. I just bought a decent case, power supply, and a few hard drives, and bam. Instant server.

As far as graphics card, I would go with something cheaper unless you have a specific reason. If your CPU has a built in graphics processor, that’s probably good enough. My CPU didn’t, so I had to throw a $30 card in.

JohnWorks, 7 months ago

It really kinda depends on what type of Minecraft server you’re running. I was running Plex and Minecraft on unRaid with like 16gigs of ram and an i3 8100 and it was fine until I started doing more intense moded Minecraft. The iGPU in Intel processors can handle transcoding really well so it’s a pretty good all in one solution. I imagine if you’re going to heavily modded Minecraft you could probably get away with a current gen i5 or maybe even i3 if you’re on a budget. Looks like the i3 13100 has hyper threading and my old 8100 didn’t. Not sure how big of a difference it would make.