this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
987 points (99.5% liked)

Technology

58009 readers
2949 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

Eh, it looks like ARM laptops are coming along. I give it a year or so for the process to be smooth.

For servers, AWS Graviton seems to be pretty solid. I honestly don't need top performance and could probably get away with a Quartz64 SBC, I just don't want to worry about RAM and would really like 16GB. I just need to server a dozen or so docker containers with really low load, and I want to do that with as little power as I can get away with for minimum noise. It doesn't need to transcode or anything.

[–] CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Man so many SBCs come so close to what you're looking for but no one has that level of I/O. I was just looking at the ZimaBlade / ZimaBoard and they don't quite get there either: 2 x SATA and a PCIe 2.0 x4. ZimaBlade has Thunderbolt 4, maybe you can squeeze a few more drives in there with a separate power supply? Seems mildly annoying but on the other hand, their SBCs only draw like 10 watts.

Not sure what your application is but if you're open to clustering them that could be an option.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Here's my actual requirements:

  • 2 boot drives in mirror - m.2 or SATA is fine
  • 4 NAS HDD drives - will be SATA, but could use PCIe expansion; currently have 2 8TB 3.5" HDDs, want flexibility to add 2x more
  • minimum CPU performance - was fine on my Phenom II x4, so not a high bar, but the Phenom II x4 has better single core than ZimaBlade

Services:

  • I/O heavy - Jellyfin (no live transcoding), Collabora (and NextCloud/ownCloud), samba, etc
  • CPU heavy - CI/CD for Rust projects (relatively infrequent and not a hard req), gaming servers (Minecraft for now), speech processing (maybe? Looking to build Alexa alt)
  • others - actual budget, vault warden, Home Assistant

The ZimaBlade is probably good enough (would need to figure out SATA power), I'll have to look at some performance numbers. I'm a little worried since it seems to be worse than my old Phenom II x4, which was the old CPU for this machine. I'm currently using my old Ryzen 1700, but I'd be fine downgrading a bit if it meant significantly lower power usage. I'd really like to put this under my bed, and it needs to be very quiet to do that.

[–] CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

Those are tough requirements to meet, I'm not sure there is a low power CPU that can do it all. You would likely need to cluster some devices but that means you need a separate NAS anyway and that kind of defeats the purpose for your case.

load more comments (2 replies)