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Processor: (3.40 GHz) 4-Core Intel Core i7-6700 Processor
Memory (RAM): 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 PC4 U Memory (for i-series/Core Processors)
Graphics Card: Integrated Graphics (with i series processors only) +$0.00
Drive 1: 3TB HDD SATA 7.2k 3.5" Hard Drive
Drive 2: 3TB HDD SATA 7.2k 3.5" Hard Drive
M.2 Storage: 512GB M.2 SSD NVMe Drive
Price: $291.95
My main concern with this option is energy usage. The CPU’s TDP is 65W, the CPU in my current server’s TDP is 35W.
It does have a few advantages over my current setup:
- More RAM 8 → 32
- Better CPU, passmark score 4766 → 8091, threads 4 → 8
- Ability to use RAID, current setup only has the capacity for 1 drive.
Is this a good option or is there a better option? I’ve also been considering using an external drive enclosure with software RAID, but I heard that could be unreliable.
EDIT: Is the price good? Shipping is quite expensive (about $100), so I’m only planning on buying it if the deal is good.
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If you are planning to use it as a jellyfin or other media server, look for 8th Gen or later Intel. They have Intel quicksync that provide hardware decoding.
Why 8th gen? Wikipedia and Plex say quicksync was added in Sandy Bridge.
QuickSync is available on earlier gen machines. I have 7th gen with it.
Intel Quick Sync video saw a lot of improvements on 8th gen & since it’s all so old the pricing differences between 7th & 8th gen are going to be negligible.
I don’t see as nearly as many used ThinkCentre Tinys for sale with post 7th gen chips. I wonder if this is why.
I think the fact that Windows 11 is only supported on 8th gen makes the previous generations quite cheap. Many companies are preparing the upgrade to windows 11 and start throwing the old stuff out.
What are the use cases? More RAM is nice but could be overkill if you’re bottlenecked by CPU, and if this is for running a few simple VMs or as storage then you may not need much of this.
RAID is generally a good thing but don’t get complacent, follow the 3-2-1 method. I.e. you might be better off saving the cash and using a backup script to push stuff you really care about to the cloud, and pay for cloud fees vice hw.
RAID is generally a good thing but don’t get complacent, follow the 3-2-1 method
To expand on that: Redundant drive setup and backups serve completely different purposes. The only overlap is in case of a single disk failure, where RAID (or similar) may save the data.
Redundancy is all about reducing downtime in case of single hardware failures. Backups not only protect you from data loss in case of multiple simultaneous failures, but also from accidental deletion. Failures that require restoration of data almost always involve downtime. In short: You always need backups (unless it’s strictly a local cache, and easily recreatable), but if you want high availability, redundancy may help.
3-2-1-rule for backups, in case you’re unfamiliar: 3 copies of important data, on 2 different media, with 1 off-site.
Use case is a few simple VMs, Nextcloud, storage, maybe a minecraft server and probably something like Jellyfin later on.
This will be fine. But assume you’ll want to swap out the hard drives in the future for more, larger, NAS appropriate disks.
If you’re as paranoid as me about data integrity, SAS drives on a host adapter card in “Initiator Target” (IT) mode with write-cache on the disks disabled is the safest. It will degrade performance when writing many small files concurrently, but not as badly as with SATA drives (that’s for spinning disks, of course, not SSD). With a good error-correcting redundant system such as ZFS you can probably get away with enabled write cache in most cases. Until you can’t.
