Servers piss away power at idle because they're not designed for low idle power consumption.

I personally just a regular PC desktop because I need the expansion slots. But SFF PCs are amazing home servers, and have more than enough power for what you actually need.

Also don't forget laptops. They're designed from the group up to be efficient AND have a built in UPS. My home server for the longest time was an old laptop with 32 gigs of ram (back when that was a huge amount).

I keep a Dell laptop as a server. I used to run stuff on my desktop, but an electricity outage screwed me one time I was away for 2 weeks and the fist night the building admin decided to do some works after midnight (I know because I stopped getting alerts on my phone). That 2 week downtime cost me money (thanks guys!).

So I bought a 2018 Dell laptop with a messed-up screen. Now when there is downtime, the laptop stays on, connectivity goes away for a few mins (which doesn't bother me) and everything is resolved fast.

So, I suggest either your desktop+UPS, or a 5yo laptop (just make sure it's 'high-end' - for its age). I then upgrade RAMs & SSD/M2 from Crucial (I like the convenience of their app) so I end up making decent "server laptops" for under €300.

Laptops rely on batteries so... no. Thats a fire hazard to have them connected 24/7

Laptops make great home servers. I have a Thinkpad (broken display) with i7 8th gen, 16gig ram running quite a few workloads for me 24/7. Due to exorbitan cloud costs, I use it as a sort of staging area for apps from my side projects. Tunnel it to a $4 digital ocean vps and voila you have a serious cloud instance at a fraction of the cost.

Except for network latency I presume?

Yes latency is a bit high. But that doesn't matter much for my use cases

Laptops are also not really designed to be always on. I've used some like this in the past, but there are things to watch for:

- batteries might not like being constantly charged. You might kill them, hopefully they don't swell. It might be interesting to remove the battery if you can, but then you indeed lose the feature they provide to survive power cuts.

- the disk drives are constantly parking their heads, make sure that the parking policy is ok (won't wear them to fast). Maybe less of an issue with many laptops coming with SSDs.

- some laptops just heat too much and power off too often, especially in summer.

- their hardware might end up dying quite fast.

I think I would still use an old laptop as a home server if I had suitable one, especially since it helps making such a machine useful for a longer time even when they are not quite usable for the web of today anymore (I like the reuse spirit it has), but I've found my rockpro64 (a nice single board computer) way more reliable in this role.

I guess YMMV depending on the laptop models. I can definitely imagine that a solid laptop with its battery removed can work well as a server.

I notice that macOS optimises charging for this scenario. Keeping the battery under 80% charge if you rarely disconnect it.

I’m surprised that the Linux distributions I use don’t do this automatically but I bet it could be configured.

Good point, and good feature.

If I'm to believe this bug report [1], KDE actually offers throttling charge, but I suspect the Linux kernel lacks support for this kind of stuff for many laptops, maybe also because sometimes the laptop itself does not support this.

Apparently, one should be able to see these files on a supported laptop:

   /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_start_threshold
   /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_start_threshold
   /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_stop_threshold

I don't have them on the HP EliteBook G6 laptop I'm currently using.

But thanks for reminding me this. I was considering using an original PinePhone as a Bluetooth receiver. Unfortunately, Wifi and Bluetooth require a battery to be present in this phone and I was a bit concerned leaving it plugged in at all times. I'll need to check if the kernel the hardware and support this. Still a bit concerned that the battery will be wearing out fast, I'm afraid Bluetooth will be using the battery power even if the phone is plugged, which is a bummer.

I don't have those on my Dell XPS13 Developer Edition 9370 either.

Would be interesting to know which chipsets support it.

You can hack that on any system that lets you read the battery status. All you need is a smart plug. You power the laptop from the smart plug. You switch off the plug when the battery is at 80% and you switch it on again when it's at 20%.

This has a major drawback: it's constantly using battery cycles.

Does a computer with charging throttle like described draw power from battery too, or does it use the power from the plug directly?

I know that there are laptops that bypass the battery if plugged into the mains but I think that the answer varies case by case.

A battery level check every five minutes should be more than enough, not a big draw from the battery for a laptop.

I don't think there's any standard interface for the laptop to control its charging.

Frame.work laptops have a firmware setting to stop charging at 90%, to extend battery life.

I've used several laptops as file servers in hot apartments without AC and haven't had issues. The trick is to make sure you're not running a bunch of bloat you don't need (which is the root cause of 99% of "my old computer became slow") Slap something like debian on the laptop and don't even bother installing a desktop environment. The load of an NFS server sitting there idle most of the time and a few other system services doing basically nothing is negligible, any laptop should be able to handle it in 40 C weather. If not then you probably have some dust issues, so blow it out and see if the issue resolves itself. Keep the screen partially open (you can turn it off though) to help with ventilation.

I've never had any laptop die while operating like this. I only replace them when I replace my primary use laptop with something new, demoting my last primary use laptop to the server role.

This is my second laptop running as a headless server. I had a shitty consumer i3 2nd gen latop running things just fine. Haven't had any battery hazards. And I live near the equator too.

I have an oldish (2018?) i3 Intel NUC that's absolutely fantastic as a server.

Ditto. Downsized from a larger xenon box into a nuc. Instead of RAID I just have a good backup approach. It doesn't matter if my home server suffers a day of downtime (which it did from a failed SSD).

Especially with the new Raspberry Pi 5 performance. Faster CPU but also much faster data access with M.2 SSD support. Get an 8GB model, add large CPU/GPU heatsink, and add extra heat sinks on the RAM and SSD. It silently run forever.

I'm curious if we'll see 16GB and 32GB RAM options to make it easier to run models like Mixtral 8x7b?

With the need for active cooling, I am no longer convinced Rpi is that great anymore. I loved mine 3b+ but at this point a cheap x86 sff provides much more utility at similar cost and power levels.

The Ryzen 7840 stuff is great but even a 5800 would be fantastic. They have been getting quite cheap lately.

An 8GB Pi 5 costs $80. For another $20 you can get a case and power adapter. What Ryzen SFF can you get with everything but a disk for $100? And how much more power would it use?

If you know of such a product I’m very interested. It’d make a great base for a router.

I remember a time when the Pi was just 15 euro. Now it's nowhere near that.

There are plenty of x86 dual and quad cores around 100-150 "dollars". They are just as bad as the new Pi. Better spend a bit more and get a much better product.

Yeah! Back during lockdown was running an instance Boinc, folding protein using an allegedly obsolete HP SOHO server. The power consumption was around 300 watts and it kicked out heat like there was no tomorrow. Bearing in mind it was a hot summer, made worse by my attic office/oven I suffered greatly for the cause. In the cold winter months though it was bliss...

Why not just turn it off in the summer? That seems like needless suffering.

It was doing "protein folding at home" for Covid that summer and the work modules would take 7-8 hours so it wasn't an option. Next summer it stayed off!

I have a secondhand Dell Poweredge T320, with a single Xeon E5-2428L CPU, its server-class, but in a tower format (the T in T320), so it's the best of both worlds, and the CPU is low power (the L in the name). Cost me 400€ with 24GB RAM and some disks.

It's been running for over 6 years I think. It's only noisy for a couple minutes when starting up, then it's pretty quiet.