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Comment by shiftpgdn | Hacker News Reader

Don't bring a server into your home if you value your sanity. Those little fans spin at 20,000RPM and can be heard throughout your house.

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I remember when the company I was working at bought a bunch of new Sun hardware, and ended up throwing out all their old Sun 420Rs. Despite being slightly outdated, they were still in perfect condition, so I took the 4 of them to the house (carefully, because they were heavy) and set up a pretend data center.

The first shock, I can confirm, was the noise they made. I ended up relegating them to the basement, which was otherwise unused.

The second shock was when my utility bill came in the next month. It's very easy to know the power consumption of enterprise-class servers for planning purposes. There's a giant abstraction between the power consumption on paper, and the power consumption on your home utility bill that I think everybody working around servers should experience at least once.

They were retired, shortly after.

The noisiest system I've ever owned was a Sun T1000 1U server. Here's some examples. I tried to mute it a bit by putting it in a huge tupperware-like under-bed storage box, but even that didn't help one bit.

http://www.mrbill.net/t1k/noise/

I worked on a stack of T1000s. We had a room next to our sysadmin hovel that we used for setting up systems before putting them in the datacenter. I worked remotely a lot, and would periodically reboot these servers. When they booted, part of their POST was running their fans at 99% of their RPM capability. The noise was astounding, and my coworkers grew pretty tired of me...

I had the opportunity to get a 7U Compaq server for cheap one time (quad xeon CPUs, tons of RAM, 2 different RAID arrays). And I'm looking at it thinking "Wow, this would be so cool to have at the house!".

But then I look at the label by the dual power supplies: 20A circuit required -- each! I would have to pay an electrician to install a new breaker and run a new line to it. And that would have doubled my purchase costs. I passed.

Heard the same often repeated about enterprise grade storage arrays. These things keep the disks spinning pretty much all the time. A home grade NAS is going to aggressively power save.

Absolutely: don't confuse home/SME with enterprise grade. The needs are very different.

As someone who was forced to have a 1U server with a tiny 12k RPM fan on his desk for a week while doing some forensics on it: i agree.

The 1U servers are very loud. But a 4U or tower server will be fairly quiet, and have the bonus ability to hold more disks. A must for VM's, disk contention on spinning disks gets pretty high after your 2nd VM.

2nd disk or a single SSD.

Depends on workload of course, but for most VMs they read a lot more than they write so an SSD can handle quite a few before you notice any IO-related latency (3-4 small web-apps, 1-2 medium, 1 database VM).

The OP also put his two drives into RAID 1 so they won't get any benefit of having two drives.

RAID1 does get you faster random IOPS, so it's not like there's no benefit...

Nice, I thought RAID 1 just gave redundancy.

I use mdadm's RAID 10 on 2 drives for redundancy and speed.

"In mdadm, the RAID10 level creates a single complex software RAID that combines features of both RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring). Multiple copies of all data blocks are arranged on multiple drives following a striping discipline." http://doc.opensuse.org/products/draft/SLES/SLES-storage_sd_...

RAID 1 mostly gives more random read IOPS, not faster. You have two drives from which to read data, since they're mirrored.

You do have more chances for the spindles to be near your data (especially with >2 drives in the array), which can slightly reduce average latency, but that isn't as large an effect.

I'd use the term "can" rather than "does" just because the performance is tiny[0] and some RAID controllers don't do a very good job utilising it.

[0]http://kmwoley.com/blog/?p=429

I'm assuming now that most of my VMs will be completely cached in my 24 GB RAM.

Disk contention?

I'm expecting to cache my VM disks in RAM completely while I do my experiments.

Yeah I don't see how Xeon makes much sense for CV in the home.

I think you'd do much better to pick up a milk crate miner with a core i* processor.

It's not just CV, but I get your point.

Mine are more like 8k RPM. And if you have a room to isolate them in, it's not so bad (watch temps!).

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