I am currently looking for Thin Clients on ebay to use as my main server instead of the RPi 4 with an external USB drive.
I found decent offers for:
- Dell Optiplex 3020M with i5-4590T 4GB RAM 120GB SSD
- Dell Wyse 5070 with Celeron J4105 or Pentium Silver J5005 both with 8GB RAM 64GB SSD
Given the current prices of new hardware my questions are:
- Should I go for 8GB RAM?
- Or are 4GB RAM fine and I should take double the storage?
Things I want to run on this server:
- Karakeep
- FreshRSS
- Paperless-NGX or Papra
- Immich
- Booklore
Because I plan to mostly use podman I tried to check for virtualization and all three suppoert Intels VT-x technolgy, will that be fine for my use case?
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Just throwing this in here as another thing to consider - instruction set. From a quick check (so I’m happy to be told I’m wrong) the Celeron & Pentium options don’t support AVX. That means some stuff - and I’m giving a hard stare at MongoDB here, but there will be others - is not going to run, or at best you’re going to be either stuck with old versions or recompiling yourself from source.
(I don’t know if any of your apps require Mongo or AVX, but I was bitten by this in the past and it was one of the main reasons I eventually upgraded one of my small clusters.)
I think I never heard about AVX before, what is it? And is it a newer technology or why do they both don’t support it?
Advanced Vector Extensions instruction set; introduced with Sandy Bridge in 2011, but not included in Pentium/Celeron branded processors even after then for reasons best known only to Intel.
Mongo is the application that has most irritated me by requiring it, but I doubt it’s the only one.
I would go with a refurbished Lenovo TinyPC with a quad/hexacore and some 16 GB RAM. These used to go for 200-300 EUR, but this might have changed recently. I run an AMD Fujitsu thin client as my opnsense firewall.
Containers don’t need VT/SVM (unless you’re doing something weird like Kata Containers)
Thanks a lot! So only for VMs?
Correct (which is why I mentioned Kata, as that’s a container runtime backed by microvms, sort of like how AWS uses firecracker to run lambdas and “serverless” container workloads)
I would go for the Wyse 5070 as a server. More RAM is good and the CPUs while somewhat slower are more power efficient.
The 4/5th gen Intel CPUs are the last gen that is really quite poor in power efficiency when mostly idling. 6/7gen made huge improvements in that regard.
Upgrading the storage should be possible quite easily.
Yeah power efficency should not be undervalued! But I read that the Wyse 5070 CPUs officially only support 8GB RAM so no big upgrades possible.
At some point the benefit of extra RAM isn’t there anymore compared to what the CPU can actually run. With a CPU like that 8GB is probably sufficient and 16 would be merely nice to have for some additional caching.
I think it depends. when you run many things for yourself and most services are idle most of the time, you need more RAM and cpu performance is not that important. a slower CPU might make the services work slower, but RAM is a boundary to what you can run. 8 GB is indeed a comfortable amount when you don’t need to run even a desktop environment and a browser on it besides the services, but with things like Jellyfin and maybe even Immich, that hoard memory for cache, it’s not that comfortable anymore.
Try to get as much ram as you can within your budget.
Always go with more ram. I can say that from experience.
I’m partial to fanless, but keep in mind my empire of dirt is almost entirely fanless so I’m just partial to it.
