* Pentium G5420 has 54W TDP. That's a lot. It'll be noisy under load. I'd prefer something like Celeron G4932E with 27W. I don't need performance, I need quiet operation and ECC support.
* iLO enablement kit is $100 and need physical delivery. No more $5 ebay key. That's a shame for home consumer.
Also I was not able to find a price. Hoping for the best. Buying Gen8 for $300 with cheap iLO key was a great purchase.
CPU seems to be not soldered, so may be it'll be possible to downgrade.
The specs on paper won't tell you the whole story. I've got the Pentium G5400 and even though it's rated at 58W TDP its actual power consumption and heat output is on the low end.
I don't have my notebook with me but I ran a small at home experiment with a kill-a-watt sort of device while monitoring temps. Found consumption to be around 21W in idle, 26W for light loads, between 35W and 42W when doing heavy loads like compiling, transcoding, etc.
Temps are 28C in idle, up to 42-ish under load.
These CPUs lack Turbo Boost which is responsible for high temps in many instances.
TDP is a guideline for cooling, it says nothing about noise, or even power draw. The former is a factor of the cooling system you have paired, the latter can be completely arbitrary as long as the chip can average itself out to the rated heat dissipation (which is what the TDP measures).
If you want a quiet home server, get a tower, my ThinkServer TD340 was hella quiet even with two Sandy Bridge-EN chips installed. Beyond that it doesn't really matter, hell, swap out the CPU cooler and case fans with Noctua ones to go the extra mile.
UK Pricing direct from HPE - expect sticker shock
https://www.hpe.com/uk/en/product-catalog/servers/proliant-s...
HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus E-2224 S100i 4LFF-NHP 180W External PS Server P16006-421 £ 839 * inc VAT
HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus E-2224 S100i 4LFF-NHP 1TB 180W External PS Server P18584-421 £ 922 * inc VAT
HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus G5420 8GB-U S100i 4LFF-NHP 180W External PS Server P16005-421 £ 629 * inc VAT
HPE iLO Advanced 1-server License with 1yr Support on iLO Licensed Features 512485-B21 £ 394 * inc VAT
HPE iLO Advanced Flexible Quantity License with 1yr Support on iLO Licensed Features 512486-B21 £ 394 * inc VAT
HPE iLO Advanced Flexible Quantity License with 3yr Support on iLO Licensed Features BD506A £ 444 * inc VAT
HPE 16GB (1x16GB) Dual Rank x8 DDR4-2666 CAS-19-19-19 Unbuffered Standard Memory Kit 879507-B21 £ 236 * inc VAT
HPE 8GB (1x8GB) Single Rank x8 DDR4-2666 CAS-19-19-19 Unbuffered Standard Memory Kit 879505-B21 £ 174 * inc VAT
HPE Trusted Platform Module 2.0 Gen10 Option 864279-B21 £ 66 * inc VAT
HPE MicroServer Gen10 SFF NHP SATA Converter Kit 870213-B21 £ 11 * inc VAT
HPE 1TB SATA 6G Entry 7.2K LFF (3.5in) RW 1yr Wty HDD 843266-B21 £ 96 * inc VAT
HPE 4TB SATA 6G Midline 7.2K LFF (3.5in) RW 1yr Wty HDD 801888-B21 £ 419 * inc VAT
HPE Mobile USB DVD-RW Optical Drive 701498-B21 £ 119 * inc VAT
Still a lot more than some of the previous versions.
echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online
Alternatively you could reduce the clock speed to 1.9GHz for both cores:
cpufreq-set -f 1900 (need to load the userspace governor also)
And of course you can schedule this to happen at a particular time of day.
Especially in a home server, the CPU will be maxed out 0.001% of its life, if that. The only stat that matters is idle power, which it will be at for the majority of its life.
I'm curious: are you going to put this under your desk?
I guess that's why
The Gen8 Microservers seemed neat, but they are getting old and rarer on eBay. Gen10 seems like a step back performance and feature wise.
With ILO not available (or a $100 upgrade), what is the benefit for a home / small business / enthusiast user of a Microserver vs. a custom built system? I could probably build a Ryzen based PC with a better performance / price ratio, just minus the ILO, and it's probably going to be quieter. Any optinions on this?
If you don't care about size, you can do much better for cheaper, and be able to replace everything with standard parts if you have problems in the future.
So, what are these "couple apps"? You already have a decent storage solution. You might consider a RPi 4 with 4G RAM for NextCloud and some apps.
Other than that, I personally like the ASRock DeskMini A300. Slap an Athlon in it, and call it a day (keep in mind you need a "G"-Processor, with iGPU!).
At home, I've built a homeserver around a X470 and Ryzen 5 2600 - it runs everything using Unraid: Storage, Home-Assistant, PLEX, Node-RED, Grafana for the living room display, the secondary pi-hole instance, and also my personal Gaming VM. It runs at 15% load during idle, drawing 70 W (including Vega 56 GPU).
I'm pretty happy with my setup.
It's not like the OS drive needs the performance when the vast majority of your data is written to ZFS.
Still, USB 3.2 probably means some kind of decently reliable USB stick would probably work instead.
Hopefully there's still a way.
Wood burns, plastic melts. When you have a bunch of racks full of a bunch of servers undrler heavy load, managing the environmental temperature of the datacenter is very important.
Yes, but no. Yes, that will work. No, that will very likely not be compliant with your local RFI regulations.
That being said there is little excuse for cases with non-deburred edges when you can get cases that are fully painted (in and out) and have most cut-outs folded over for surprisingly little money (~50 €, which really makes you question how any of the questions make a profit off of it, not to speak of workers involved).
1) Even water-cooled equipment uses forced air cooling to cool the water heat exchanger (unless you happen to own water rights to a river, in which case we have a different discussion). A lot of the highest mark-up goes to bespoke on-prem data centers (e.g. hospitals, labs) where the air isn't necessarily cleaned to spec. I would therefore think you want some stuff between the air and the CPU heat exchanger to force the air around some turns to knock some of the debris out of the air. So a grill makes sense.
2) Most buyers are buying single units, but most units are sold to buyers buying them in bulk, with a service contract.
3) If you're making a grill, it's gotta look like something.
4) You want something that approaches a consistent theme for your accessories: monitors, keyboards, mice, printers, etc. Even without the logos, you can match the HP mouse to the HP keyboard and HP server. Same for Dell, Lenovo, etc.
5) I find the big manufacturers try to slowly evolve their design over the years. You can walk into a place (hospital, power plant, ship, whatever) and quickly identify it as a Dell shop or an HP shop.
6) Electric discharge machining makes it relatively easy to go from CAD drawing to ready-for-production molds.
7) You need some low-risk projects for your young mechanical engineers.
8) At scale, your custom EDM-mold plastic grill may be cheaper than stock filters of sufficiently similar performance.
8) Branding matters.
This is one of the purposes of a Design Language -- it ensures users of your products can identify what does and doesn't go with your products. And it also ensures that if a user has used one of your products, the signifiers for your other products are immediately apparent to them.
For IO: My 8 year old one lets me saturate SATA at 500megabyte per second. With SAS which it also supports it's supposedly 3000megabyte per second, bit I have never tried it.
For memory: ECC
For processing: Dual Xeon CPU config
For storage: Nice storage pods.
For admin: Out of band ILO like functionality, although I've never tried it
For home: SILENCE! My machine measures at 32db
Bios can be replaced with coreboot.
Some buyers and some vendors actually care about security.
