I like being able to drop in whatever disk I need to for expansion or replacement.
I didn’t move that far away (to Debian + ZFS), so that limitation still remains. Although the addition of Raid-Z expansion should alleviate things quite a bit.
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023
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My NAS/home server takes about 180 kWH/year, or 20W on average (costs me about 5 Euro/month). This feels like a lot to me and makes up a good chunk of my total energy usage.
What I did to optimize it is mostly select a “low-power” x86 platform, and limit the number of disks. I also decided not to use TrueNAS because it couldn’t let the disks from going to sleep.
The machine hosts 10 TB of usable storage (+RAID 1), syncthing, immich, file server, Influx DB, Grafana, and a few other services.
Knoppix is a fun one :) Didn’t know it was independent.
spoiler
Debian, Arch, Fedora, OpenSUSE, NixOS, Slackware, AerynOS, Alpine, Gentoo, LFS
Can you name 10 base/independent distros?
2·3 months agoTo be fair, $600 for 64GB of RAM is a steal in this economy (you could probably sell the RAM alone for $800). So if you want that much RAM and are ok with the rest of the system - go for it. I mostly wanted to point out why I personally would not like such a machine (why I’m “sleeping” on it).
Mine was the equivalent of $660 at the time with 32GB of RAM (excl. HDDs). In this RAMpocalypse it would probably cost around $1k.
I am interested in trying out an Arm/RISC-V PC for a Linux server. However, what stops me from buying almost all of them is that they require you to use a dubious, poorly-maintained manufacturer fork of some Linux distro.I don’t want my hardware to become e-waste when the manufacturer looses interest in 10 months, so running an upstream distro (like Fedora/Debian/NixOS) is a hard requirement for me. It seems that they half-solved that issue for this machine, so that’s actually good progress.
For this particular machine, Jeff Geerling also reported that the idle power draw is 17W. That’s higher than my faster, fully-upgradable mATX AM5 x86 NAS…
Debian also supports “unattended-upgrades”: https://wiki.debian.org/PeriodicUpdates
I actually have it set up the same way on both: Automatically install updates (and restart some services), but don’t reboot. I don’t think it was different/easier on Ubuntu.
Overall, the two distros are very similar for a server application. If you’re already running Debian on your PC, I would also go with that for a server.
2·3 months agoI guess 3ms would not be noticeable to most people.
It would be interesting to see how this behaves at lower refresh rates. Loosing the same 1 or 2 frames at 60/144 Hz should be noticeable.
It’s clear that you’re making some trade-offs with a 1000 EUR gaming PC in the current memory shortage.
What looks nice about Mifcom is that they give you 3 years of warranty, use standard components, show you what they are, and allow you to change those. But, indeed the PSU looks very cheap and I have never personally ordered from them.
With Tuxedo you certainly gain better Linux (Tuxedo OS) support, but they’re also rather expensive.
And even that one with its mediocre CPU is still more expensive than the Cube.
Keep in mind that the Steam Machine roughly has the CPU performance of a Ryzen 5 3600, so a 8400F should actually be quite a bit faster.
I filtered for the 9060 XT on Galaxus and got about 20 results below 1k EUR, e.g. this one for 844: https://www.galaxus.de/de/s1/producttype/pc-18?filter=347%3D7709265&so=5. But it seems that Galaxus mis-labeled the GPU, and it’s the non-XT version 👎 This one for 899 EUR actually seems to have the XT though: https://www.galaxus.de/de/s1/product/kiebel-viper-v-1000-gb-16-gb-amd-ryzen-5-5500-radeon-rx-9060-xt-pc-69216705
I also linked a Mifcom machine in another post, this is the German equivalent for 900 EUR: https://www.mifcom.de/entry-gaming-pc-ryzen-5-8400f-rx-9060-id186 But, this also comes with the non-XT version and selecting the 9060 XT 8 GB pushes it to 1059 EUR.
Edit: I guess the RX 9060 non-XT should still be quite a bit faster than the Steam Machine though, it’s just bad if the retailers (and me) mix them up.
Beating the price point of the Steam Cube is almost impossible if bought new, even full diy systems have a hard time unless using used parts.
A regular pre-built with a 9060 XT 8GB can be had for about 10% less than the Steam Machine (900 Euro). That will be quite a bit faster and also upgradeable. The main advantage of the Steam Machine is the form factor and power consumption.
I would go for a pre-built computer with an RX 9060 XT (preferably with 16 GB VRAM). That GPU will run loops around a Steam machine. You can get such a pre-built for around 1000 CHF:
I think for me spin-down was working initially. But then I added some Docker containers and those could only be run on the HDDs, blocking spin down. With Debian I just put the containers on the smaller SSD, allowing the HDDs to spin down.