Liam Provenlproven@vivaldi.net
Nov 14, 2026, 8:41 PMTime Remaining
2 hours, 38 minutes, 42 seconds
Less funny, but more useful...
Replies
- Liam Provenlproven@vivaldi.netNov 14, 2026, 9:31 PM
Speaking of this... Does anyone do a cheap Microserver type box these days that's very quiet running, takes old cheap RAM, can hold at least 4 cheapo SATA HDDs, and uses generic low-power x86 chips so I can use any old random OS?
Hugo Millsdarkling@mstdn.socialNov 14, 2026, 9:35 PM@lproven I'm betting no. When I've gone looking for something like this in the past (over many years), you get low power, or you get enough SATA ports, but you don't get both at the same time.
These days, it's hard even to get a fanless CPU, unless you go ARM, in which case you don't get any SATA ports at all. And no PCIe slots to add them. If you're lucky, there'll be an M.2 slot that you can use for expansion -- but then, good luck finding an M.2 card that'll give you lots of SATA ports...
- Hugo Millsdarkling@mstdn.socialNov 14, 2026, 9:40 PM
@lproven Everything's *limited*. Not in the individual capabilities, but in the combinations. CPU soldered to motherboard. RAM soldered to motherboard. I/O functionality in the SoC so you can't tweak it.
And then it's all built to some marketeer's idea of "market segments" that don't actually match what you want to do.
Nov 15, 2026, 10:09 AMWhen I last upgraded my NAS, I got a Pentium Silver, which is finales, quad core and faster than the old AMD E350 it replaced. A quick look on mini-itx.com suggests that Intel has newer chips that fit the same niche but they’re hard to get.
Chenbro has discontinued the case my NAS uses though, and has no good replacements.
Hanno Zullahzulla@infosec.exchangeNov 14, 2026, 9:38 PM@lproven Ugreen DXP is nice, it's standard x86 hardware with drive bays. I have the 2 bay version, but 4 bay versions exist. The 2 bay version is available with a low power Intel CPU and DDR5 and also alternatively with a more powerful AMD CPU and DDR4.
- Hanno Zullahzulla@infosec.exchangeNov 14, 2026, 9:45 PM
@lproven I'm running a DXP2800 with an N100 and 8GB of DDR5. Tried installing various Linux distributions, no problem whatsoever. Runs Debian now. It's fast enough to serve Immich to the family running on podman.
- Liam Provenlproven@vivaldi.netNov 14, 2026, 9:49 PM
@hzulla Handy! Thank you!
Is Immich demanding, then?
- Hanno Zullahzulla@infosec.exchangeNov 14, 2026, 10:00 PM
@lproven Immich does local on-machine face recognition and image recognition, but these only stress the machine once when you upload and postprocess 20+ years of family photos. In daily use as an SMB/Resilio server and Immich photo server, the NAS is idle most of the time and the N100 is snappy for my use cases. I'm really happy with it.
- Hanno Zullahzulla@infosec.exchangeNov 14, 2026, 10:08 PM
@lproven it's very straightforward to tune Immich to use fewer resources. Postprocessing of image uploads takes a bit more time, but since your mobile device does the upload in the background, you won't notice this anyway.
Nov 15, 2026, 7:29 AM
Paul Richardspauldoo@mastodon.scotNov 14, 2026, 10:00 PM@lproven do actual HP MicroServers not count? My “Gen 10 plus” is ticking along nicely. Some old “low power” quad core CPU, 4 sata bays, nvme via a PCIe adapter.
- Liam Provenlproven@vivaldi.netNov 14, 2026, 10:08 PM
- Hanno Zullahzulla@infosec.exchangeNov 14, 2026, 10:11 PM
- Paul Richardspauldoo@mastodon.scotNov 14, 2026, 10:29 PM
@hzulla @lproven @darkling The 4 x 3.5” SATA HDDs might dominate here I think. At 4 to 6W each at idle, that adds up to 20W. More when they are active. I believe the old Xeon in my microserver idles at 3-5W, which is a lot compared to N100, but that extra few W doesn’t matter that much given the disks.