System engineer and homelaber for over 5 years
That’s something that I thought too, the R710 is over 12 yo, the R320 is starting to be considered old even for the homelab, the Rx30 series is fairly priced, the Rx40 series is still pretty expensive.
Maybe 2 R430s would be good, I will have to check noise and power consumption, but even one R430 should be more powerful that a few SFFs.
I have a baremetal server at hetzner but I like to have some stuff locally for full control of the data, + if I forget to pay a cloud bill my data won’t be lost.
I run over 80 services locally, in total homelab and cloud I run over 220 services, some are duplicate docker containers DBs and HA systems, but primarily I have replaces any SaaS product that I used with self hosted alternatives.
My current pc with some extra ram should be enough to handle the basic workloads, and in the future an SFF should be able to fully cover my needs.
Basically yes, I use the 4 SAS drives for bulk storage, 40TB raw/20TB on RAID10 for backups and media storage, + I run some VMs on an ssd disk that I installed in the DVD bay.
The R710 has 12 cores across 2 CPUs and 192 GB of ram, my workloads are primarily RAM heavy, I run over 50 services on the homelab.
The R710 uses around 160w on average, while the R320 uses 80w.
The SFF PCs should draw under 40w each, sonfor the some power consumption I should be able to get 4 SFF PCs with more CPU cores but a bit less memory.
Yup, right now I consume ~650kw, double than the average house, it comes at 130€ per month (total consumption with 2ACs, PC and the 2 servers) unfortunately I will not be able to pay more than 150€ for electricity.
That swhat I was thinking, the R320 is still quite good and can also run some VMs until I save a few money and get some lenovos or convert my computer to a server.
Btw, I have notices that when I run VMs with big disks (over 400GB) using NFS from the R320 to the R710 through a 1gb Ethernet on xcp-ng, some times the filesystem will fail and remount into read only, have this happened to you too? Or was something wrong with my network/config?