this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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Server vs miniPC dilemma for homelab (piefed.zip)
submitted 4 months ago by TisButAScratch@piefed.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I'm currently facing a dilemma. Right now, I have a synology NAS that I use to host my homelab containers (*arr, pi-hole, vaultwarden, Plex, etc).

I am planning to offload as much of that as possible to a dedicated machine, which hopefully will allow me to continue self-hosting even more demanding services (Immich, etc).

I was lucky enough to get a proper server - Supermicro, for free, with 64GB Ram DDR4 and 1TB. However, I plugged it in and that thing is NOISY.

My rack will be in the home office, where I will spend at least 8 hours a day, so I can't afford that level of noise.

What should I do? Should I try to sell the supermicro and buy something else with that money? Should I keep the RAM and SSD (and CPUs?) and build something else with them? Are there any quiet servers I could look into (I am guessing better performance but more expensive), or Should I go the MiniPC route instead (cheaper and smaller, but more limited specs)?

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[–] probable_possum@leminal.space 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The decision is yours to make. You didn't say if power consumption is important - if you keep the server on 24/7 it could be relevant. It's hard to say if you can modify the server, to make it quieter. Or if you can salvage parts. Or if you need all the CPU performance of a server CPU.

If you want to keep it or salvage parts: In my experience the fans are the noisy part of a server. I don't know the form factor of the main board or the case. I really can't say which parts you can keep and which need replacing.

120mm fans with pwm are better than 40mm fans at full speed. Bigger heat sinks, too.

If not: You can always try to sell the server and get a low power single board computer with enough (32GB+) RAM instead (hardkernel h4 or a cheap chinese alternative). IMO a celeron N is fast enough to run multiple VMs (or better: containers). The limiting parts are RAM and storage. Things like transcoding videos will take more time than on a server CPU... But immich and an *arr stack will work flawlessly for a one or two user instance.