I’m currently sporting a Dell R730 after my ixSystems freenas mini died. The R730 is a beast and is awesome; unfortunately it is currently overkill, extremely loud and electricity hungry for my use case which is primarily:
Jail running NextCloud for family phones backup
Jail running backup server software for all of our computer files to go (similar to NextCloud).
In the near future I’ll be also running:
VM with HomeAssistant OS (HAOS) for non-critical smart home assistance)
VM running Windows for BlueIris cameras recording
I am currently running 8 disks and after 5+ years of backups only using 3% of disk space. I’ll end up rotating the BlueIris camera recordings and so I don’t see a scenario where I’ll even end up in a 50% disk usage range and so I’m totally fine going down to 4 disks if it means a less loud and less energy/heat usage server.
@danb35 mentioned HPE Microserver Gen10+ which looks like it hits a lot of marks but it isn’t rack mountable. Are there some other suggestions that is still fairly enterprise level for uptime but about 50% less beefy than the Dell R730 with 50% of the noise and 50% of the energy usage?
The problem is that “rack-mount” when it comes to servers usually means “dense,” which in turn means lots of noise and high power draw. It doesn’t have to, but it usually will, particularly if you’re buying pre-built servers.
I have a Supermicro 1U server I built with a X9SCL-F motherboard and a Xeon E3-1230. With four 3.5 drive bays, it isn’t super-noisy, nor does it draw a great deal of power, but I’m not aware of anything on the market like it. The closest I could think of would be the R630 with the LFF chassis variant. Mine doesn’t seem particularly noisy to me, but I’d be very surprised indeed if it were quieter than your R730.
Heathen! It’s people like you who pollute my beautiful racks with things that are not rackmountable! And worse, things that get put on top of other things!
