MiniPC vs Servers in the Home Lab in 2024 

Whatever works 👍

My Dell Latitude E7440 consume 60 watts, when I gauge it using a smart plug. What laptop you use? In my ideal home lab, a server idle power consumption should be under 30 or less. My dream machine right now is an HP elitebook G3 mini with Intel 9th gen T series processor, but I need 2 Ethernets, so it's a dilemma.

I'm using my dad's old 7th gen pentium laptop for 1 year and have not had any issues so far.

Laptops have a built in battery backup 🫡

Dawg, that's nothing to be ashamed of. When I started out, I had my Proxmox pc running 24/7. It's a Ryzen 7 3700X, 32gb, 2 SSD, 2 HDD, 850W badass, running idle until I'd decide to actually use it. I still got it, but nowadays I just run a Minisforum N100 mini pc for Plex and Jellyfin. If two laptops are enough for your use case, they're enough.

How many minisforum machines are you using? I want to build a homelab for learning purposes. Do u think just one minisforum PC will suffice?

@@bibekkhatri I’m only using one for Proxmox. I have a second, slightly lower end one that I am using as an Emby video server. At this point in my life, It’s just a hobby. I was a developer and now that I’m retired, I “play” with networking and servers. For what I’m doing, this works just fine and the power usage for both is far less the R730. The VM’s I have run sql server, Maria DB, Home Assistant, Windows 11 when needed, Ubuntu Desktop when needed and anything else I get an urge to try. All of the machines are small. No massive drive sizes. They don’t pull a heavy, constant load. The Emby server just does video processing for movies. The movies are stored on a Synology NAS.

Depending on location i might be interested in in your 730.

@@charlesrussell9188 Thornton. Colorado. I’m not going to mess with trying to ship, but if you are local ….

Agreed

But they are slightly cheaper if you just wanna learn with lower power

@@kristopherleslie8343 Again, it depends on what you are trying to do. My main, dual Xeon E5-2697A v4 Proxmox server was only something like $1150 when I bought it. Hard drives came from the other 4 NAS servers that I already had at the time, so they were free to me, but this will ALWAYS be the case of it depends on what it is that you're doing or trying to do, what is your budget, and what hardware you are currently in possession of that you can re-use/re-purpose? If the answer is everything, not much to speak of, and nothing (because everybody has to start from SOMEWHERE), then there are a LOT of low(er) budget options that exists now, that didn't exist before. My three OASLOA Mini PCs which has the Intel N95 processor in it, I bought them a little while ago at $154 USD a piece. In other words, if price is a top priority, then you can buy relatively inexpensive PCs these days. (And I actually computed the Price/(Performance/Watt) metric to arrive at this decision as there were cheaper options, but less performant, and more expensive options, that were more performant, but also could potentially cost significantly more than $154, and everything in between. It runs the whole gamut.) Said OASLOA Mini PCs also idle at somewhere between 6-8 W a piece, and at full load, I can barely push it above 15 W, even running a parallel sparse matrix solver. And there are times, where if you are willing to spend a little bit more, then you can get that jump in performance, but you're also needing to spend more to be able to get that. If you can swing it, great. If not, then you are, more or less, relegated to what's affordable. (Again, also how I ended up with a trio of $154 Mini PCs, despite having a Proxmox server with 256 GB of RAM, two AMD Ryzen 9 5950X compute nodes for my micro HPC cluster, 100 Gbps Infiniband network/system interconnect, etc.) (A trio of the Minisforum MS-01 would have costed me about $2487 USD vs. the $462 USD that I spent on the trio of OASLOA Mini PCs. Yes, the Minisforum MS-01 would've been SIGNIFICANTLY more performant, but it would've also costed at least 5X more. And for Windows AD DC, DNS, and Pi-hole (which became AdGuardHome), I don't need the MS-01 to be able to do that.)

Learning then just mini. I’ve been down that road. Have an entire data center worth of servers just sitting here collecting dust. :)

@@kristopherleslie8343 Agreed.

Very informative, thanks for this comment. Might do something like this until I can afford a Microserver.

It pays when you don't have e cores to screw things up.

@@tendosingh5682 what?

This!..Thats why I plan to replace most of my compute rack with Minis but keep a few servers for storage.

@Spractral thank you!

@AleksejsKovalovs I have been running 5 servers with 128 GB of RAM each and still need more :) Lots of VMs and testing requires lots of RAM.

Not going to repeat, who wants the third option - it's possible to build DIY home server, and the key is H13SAE-MF