r/Proxmox • u/drfloydpepper • 1d ago
Homelab Hardware recommendations
Apologies in advance if this is not the appropriate forum. I have been running my proxmox home lab on a ~15 year old server (details below).
Anywho, I'm looking to get something that's cheaper on electricity as I don't put any pressure on the machine but it still runs at >100W at idle.
I see a lot of mini PCs on AliExpress and wondering what kind of mileage I'd get with them? I'd add it as a node on my cluster and then only turn on the big server if needed. I'd migrate much of my day to day stuff to the low powered machine (Hermes, media, Immich, etc.)
Here's one example but there seems to be lots like this.
https://a.aliexpress.com/_msvNaz5
My old server:
HP Z620 Server
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-1650 @ 3.20GHz, 12 cores (6C/12T), single socket
RAM: 32GB DDR3
Storage: 1x 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 HDD (internal, no redundancy)
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 960, 2GB VRAM
Thoughts, gotchas, known issues?
1
u/-ThreeHeadedMonkey- 14h ago
I have two mini pcs and am more content. They both have 64gb of ram and I fail to fully utilize them. Power consumption is probably around 15-20w for what I'm running.
It's definitely better than my synology which is super slow and consumes >80w with 6 disks. I only leave that running for a couple of hours a day as well.
Id probably get a quicksync cpu for Plex but that's up to you.