I’m currently facing a dilemma. Right now, I have a synology NAS that I use to host my homelab containers (*arr, pi-hole, vaultwarden, Plex, etc).
I am planning to offload as much of that as possible to a dedicated machine, which hopefully will allow me to continue self-hosting even more demanding services (Immich, etc).
I was lucky enough to get a proper server - Supermicro, for free, with 64GB Ram DDR4 and 1TB. However, I plugged it in and that thing is NOISY.
My rack will be in the home office, where I will spend at least 8 hours a day, so I can’t afford that level of noise.
What should I do? Should I try to sell the supermicro and buy something else with that money? Should I keep the RAM and SSD (and CPUs?) and build something else with them? Are there any quiet servers I could look into (I am guessing better performance but more expensive), or Should I go the MiniPC route instead (cheaper and smaller, but more limited specs)?
I faced pretty much the exact same choice, except I was given four of them, each with 8 GB of RAM.
Unfortunately they were two different hardware revisions, so the most I could achieve was two servers with 16 GB each.
They sound like a Jet taking off when powered up and the BIOS doesn’t support lower fan speeds.
Instead after months of deliberation I decided to go with a SFF Lenovo, 32 GB, 2 x 1 TB NVME, Ryzen 7, and bought this:
https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/lenovo-ideacentre-ryzen-7-32gb-2tb-desktop-lenic00aau
It’s whisper quiet and running Proxmox.
To get VM video passthrough to work I installed an extra video card, though, you could install a desktop on the host OS instead if you prefer.
The video card I used to fit inside is this:
https://www.msy.com.au/product/msi-geforce-gt-1030-4gd4-low-profile-oc-graphics-card-geforce-gt-1030-4gd4-lp-oc-73092