this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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Selfhosted

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Server vs miniPC dilemma for homelab (piefed.zip)
submitted 1 month 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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[–] FreedomAdvocate -1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I switched to a M4 Mac Mini as my home server and it is amazing. Virtually silent, incredibly powerful, yet insanely power efficient.

[–] gsv@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What software stack are you running on it though? Asahi doesn’t seem to support the M4, yet.

[–] FreedomAdvocate 2 points 1 month ago

Literally just MacOS with docker and tailscale. Haven't needed anything else.