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We don't all live in countries where electricity is near-free.

In the UK, it would cost more in electricity than the $200 Zimaboard to run one of those eBay machines for a single year.

e.g. 90W 24/7 for a year is ~£212 (~$258 US), 60W 24/7: ~£142 ($173 US)

In this price range, power-consumption is a _major_ decision factor.




If you want low power, check out the N100 systems that are out now. They use like 3W. I bought the N200 from this deal recently and it's a great little machine that can handle a lot of Plex transcodes https://slickdeals.net/f/16934029-msi-cubi-n-adl-dual-nic-in...

It's interesting that these N100 systems can cost less than some of the Zima products. So for me, I don't see much of an upside of going with them.


N100 and N200 systems are perfect price/performance for small servers. I am running a 7-year-old N3710 fanless laptop right now and it performs well enough for a few tiny sites and a postgresql database. I am pretty sure we reached this point ten years ago but I was too numb to notice it but low power devices have become powerful enough to replace the dedicated servers that we were spending tons of money on twenty years ago.


Once you get objective about what you're using that home server for, this is so true. Ignoring things like crypotomining or $FOO-At-Home gamified compute grinding, the vast majority of home needs are met by the lowest end processors. The J4105-based mini-pc I have running VMware isn't annoyingly slower (tho to be fair is definitely not faster) than the 10 year old server it replaced, but uses a fraction of the power and makes no noise.


As I read through the article I came to exactly the same conclusion.

I have an N95 mini PC that was $195 CAD, which came with 16GB RAM and a 500GB NVMe. It will also hold one SATA drive. All in a single box, although it is slightly larger and has a fan.

The NVMe slot on the Orange Pi 5 I use also keeps that mess down to a minimum. Power + network and that's a finished setup.

Edit: There are a TON of options in this space now. The value of 10 year old eBay gear is questionable at best.


Also, there are multiple SATA to m2 interfaces to get more ports on small PCs.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/203655558873 (no relation with the seller)

Although multiple SATA to USB3 cases should be a viable option too; I plan to build my next home server using one of them paired to a mini PC with lower power requirements than the one I use now.


While slightly bigger than those mini desktops, Asus and Asrock have recently released Intel N100 ITX motherboards. I have the Asus variant in a 1u short depth case and since theres no fan, its silent and capable of running some self hosted stuff at ease.


It is not true, N100 system consuming 30w at full load (or 15-25w if set in bios), and around 7-10w idle. Previous generation atoms systems were around 20w max. Even older systems like n3150 - 15w. Anything USB connected can add another 5-10w permanently.


The MSI isn’t fanless though. For a passively cooled N100 mini PC, look at the ASUS ExpertCenter PN42 or the upcoming Zotac ZBOX edge CI343. You’ll pay a bit more than for the ZimaBoard though.


90W is peak power consumption for these. They idle at about 8-9W measured at the wall socket or $22-25/year.


That's why I included a 60W cost too. What's the point running hardware 24/7/365 is it's idle?


Because home servers tend to be bursty on demand workloads.

If you doing something that is hammering a CPU at 100% 24/7, then you’d get a faster CPI to get the workload completed faster and you’d be back to having idle CPU cycles…

Now RAM on the other hand!

Free RAM is wasted RAM!


> Because home servers tend to be bursty on demand workloads.

Not all workloads can be "completed" by throwing hardware at them. The sort of thing this kind of hardware is ideal for is things like home automation.

I run Home Assistant on an Xeon ITX PC with a micro-PSU for example, it's at ~40-60% CPU and ~80% RAM (of 16GB) running inference on my camera streams, handling Zigbee and Z-Wave devices etc, running automations, handling all of the sensors for the doors, lights etc in my home. This isn't a bursty problem you can simply get a more powerful CPU for, the goal here is to keep power down and performance up because it's a constant load. A smaller, lower power micro-PC would save me a bit in energy costs if I wanted to.

For real work, people like me (us?) use real servers like you say; I run a Ryzen 9 12c/24t, AsRock Rack, 2 M.2 NVMe, HBA, 8 SAS bays, 128GB RAM, 6 GbE NICs, with dozens of VMs and containers on, a few Kubernetes clusters, and a bunch of services (git, Harbor, Argo, etc) it uses about 100-150W with my CPU downspecced to 65W TDP.

Now that's a system that has bursty workloads, but it's in a different class to these low power machines that "normal" home users are looking for.

> Now RAM on the other hand! > Free RAM is wasted RAM!

Can't argue with that.


> Free RAM is wasted RAM!

ZFS will take care of that for you.


Instant availability of the services provided without waiting on bootup, wakeup, or anything else.


So you can connect on demand? My server is mostly idle too as it only serves me.


60W might be right for an ancient desktop, but it isn't correct for at least the above microserver (2nd item). From rough memory, mine were under 40W (38W?) when the drives were spun up and active.

And likely isn't correct for the minipc (1st item) either, though I've not got one of those (yet) to measure it.


My Silver Lake NUC runs at around 8 W (IIRC) idle (running a few services, but not actively serving requests). It's 30 W or so at peak load.

Even my i3 NUC isn't that much heavier, consuming 15ish W (IIRC again) idle.


This just flat-out isn’t representative of what I’d expect a home server workload to be.


It's not the 00s anymore hardware can idle and handle light workloads without sucking the full tdp out of the socket.


More reason to buy the kind of passively cooled mini PC people get as pfSense routers from AliExpress & co. You get Jasper Lake (2021) or even Alder Lake (2023) instead of the much older Apollo Lake from 2016. The only thing you really miss out on is the form factor and the PCIe slot.


I recently got one of those passive boxes with an N5105 for opnsense. But I found it ran pretty hot. I was able to replace the thermal paste and shim the cooler a bit to get it closer to the CPU (there was originally a huge gap they bridged with a glob of paste), and it lowered the temps a bit, but it still hung out around 60-65c afterward. I think that could be OK, but it still just felt too warm too the touch. I ended up placing a USB 5V fan on the outside of the case and now it sits around 40-45c which I'm more happy with. But now I have a fan running 24/7 running on my passive device.

At the end of this ordeal, I bought another machine (MSI Cubi-N with an N200) for cheaper than the Topton Aliexpress job, which includes an internal fan. The fan is super quiet and the build quality is way better. And it comes from a reputable manufacturer which I trust more to not load any weird stuff into the bootloader. If I could do it again, I'd probably try to make my Opnsense router out of an MSI Cubi N with an N100 or N200, in both cases it would have been cheaper, more powerful, and use less electricity than the Aliexpress passive one. The only possible hiccup would be non-Intel nics that the Cubi comes with.

Just some perspective from someone who recently bought a couple of these devices.


These machines are super attractive spec-wise for their cost! However, and maybe it's FUD, I don't really trust the power supplies or the firmwares on these units. I'd much rather pay for a system with a power supply that is UL certified and a system that, at least on the surface, has a much better chain-of-custody for processor firmware. I know I could replace the power supply with something UL certified, but that now means I'm contributing to e-waste needlessly. My eyes are currently peeled for a 12th-13th gen i5/i7 1L system in my price bracket, as between the heterogeneous cores to get solid power efficiency, the ability to drop 2x NVMe SSDs and a lot of RAM, and on some of them, even the ability to get 10 Gbit, I can hit my ideal performance per watt budget and take advantage of my NAS for high performance decentralized storage.


Can't disagree with you there.

And I'm not a huge fan of the form-factor either, it gets messy once you've got your SATA connectors, power and ethernet.

Not suggesting Zima is the right solution, but ebaying dated hardware often isn't either for many of us.

Don't get me wrong, it's great there are people who can use this stuff and not pay disproportionate prices for electricity to run it; but much of the world isn't in that situation; maybe one day.


And 2X SATA ports, although they may not have enough power to drive 2X 3.5” hard drives.

You could do 2X 4TB SSD ZFS RAID1.


As others have said 60 or 90W is just not true.

Have a look at systems people have built or tested [0]. The cutoff for this table is 30W max.

[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzs...


The HP Prodesk is 12W idle though. I think the Zimaboard is 8w idle.

I agree that power consumption is a big cost that people don’t think about though.


These idle at a small fraction of what you feel is the expected power consumption, so your pricing calculation per year is way off. Far too high.

The cpu in the microserver (2nd item) is socketed, so you can swap it out for something lower power if you really wanted to.

For me, I've actually upgraded the cpus in my microservers (several of them) as I tend to use them hard at times. :)


90W f24/7? Let me stop you right there


They run laptop components so try more like 5-15W normally


EU/UK slowly going back to the Dark Ages. 'Eletricity is too expensive'.

What is next - I shower once per week to preserve energy :D




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