14 ms·
The death and rebirth of my home server
- belabartok39 2mo agoWhy not get a Beelink N95 and call it a day?
- al_borland 2mo agoI picked Beelink a couple years ago. It didn’t last long. I can’t simply reboot it. I have to unplug it, wait 5 minutes, plug it in, and then boot it. It turns OS installs and even system updates into such a hassle that it’s not even worth using anymore. I wanted to run it headless and just connect remotely, and that doesn’t really work well with this issue, as I need regular physical access. I assume it’s a bad capacitor or something. I tried changing out the power adapter, but that didn’t help. I don’t see myself ever buying another Beelink.
- graton 2mo agoPersonally I would get a used Dell Optiplex / Lenovo ThinkCentre / HP EliteDesk. Either the "mini" / "micro" if you really want small. I am a fan of the SFF (Small Form Factor) size and the Dell Optiplex models. In particular the 70XX versions that offer Intel AMT / vPro for remote management. I run a Proxmox server on my Dell Optiplex SFF 7070. With the SFF size you can add two low-profile PCIe cards, if desired. In my case I added a 10Gbit NIC. The reason I would go with a used Dell / Lenovo / HP is that these tend to be well-built machines that run for years and years 24/7 in offices and proven to work well.
- trollbridge 2mo agoOr a used tower form factor PowerEdge if you want a little bigger, but still designed to be quiet in an office environment.
- inigyou 2mo agoRaspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes. In this era you might replace it with a mini-PC (NUC style).
- plasticchris 2mo agoMake the sdcard a read only root fs, problem solved
- inigyou 2mo agoDoesn't actually help. It eventually goes corrupt anyway. It might be related to power ripple or something. Makes it easy to replace, though.
- plasticchris 2mo agoCould be some other hardware issue for you, yeah. I recall there are some problems that can happen if the usb power supply is too weak. But this fixed it for me.
- steinuil 2mo agoYeah that's more or less my goal for the setup in the post... I didn't have much time to investigate what else I could move off of the SD card but I suspect there's a few other things I could do. NixOS makes it super easy too.
- nubinetwork 2mo agoCan confirm, I've got a pi 5 here that's been running 24/7 for over a year (possibly two)... it boots fine, but anything else makes it run so slowly because the sdcard is trashed. The current setup writes to the systemd journal at least twice every minute... It's next iteration is getting a proper nvme.
- b112 2mo agoHo-ho my friend! You want to buy storage for your computer before 2030? I'm so sorry, but you now pay big time, now you sell your car for one nvme drive. Somebody set up us the bomb.
- Dylan16807 2mo ago
- arjie 2mo agoClassic power failure and raspberry pi with SD cards. When I last set up things for my parents, I simply imaged a bunch of SD cards and had the data stored on an external hard drive. I live in the US and they live in India and this is for their RaspBMC. With the SD cards they just swap a broken one with a new one and call it a day. Been 12 years or so now. Went back to their home a few years ago and everything but the opensubtitles integration works. I was surprised. I could never recreate it now. Even has one of these flirc setups so the remote works. India has unreliable power too so the SD card death was inevitable. I made a few more images and called it a day.
- bombcar 2mo agoAbusing frontier AI to determine what the hell I did with ancient installs, and then modernizing it, as been quite useful.
- marcelox86 2mo agoThis is why I'm looking into using Guix / Nix for when my home server dies and I need a replacement. Declarative setups make too much sense. The only form of history I have of the weird shit I did with a Mac mini running debian + a LaCiE HDD hub is my .bash_history file, which a chatbot was able to figure out for me.
- arjie 2mo agoMy modern server infrastructure is managed in this style. Not declarative, but the manner of management is an idempotent bash script (terraform being the “heavyweight” version of this that I discarded).
- larrydag 2mo agoI'm not a sysadmin but I often hear about server failures due to hardware just wearing out. Is there an expected shelf life of the hardware? I would expect for sure on the storage devices. So if that were the case then why isn't there some sore of daemon or system software service that tracks the expected life of the hardware? I would expect that the software would start showing warnings of imminent useful life of devices to expire.
- binaryturtle 2mo agoI'm running my own home server on an old 2014 Mac mini, 24/7 basically. It both has a SSD and a HDD (old "Fusion" disk type of machine, but I use both parts separately, the SSD part for the OS, the HDD part for the data.) A few days ago the HDD had its 100,000 Power_On_Hours anniversary. :) According to SMART this is way past the expected/ designed life time of the disk (the normalised value reports "1" since a few years when the disk hit about 42,000 Power_On_Hours) So you never know. It either works or it doesn't. You have backups for the worst case.
- qmr 2mo agoNot unlike a combustion engine, cycles can do more damage than hours.
- nickjj 2mo agoMy main desktop machine with assorted components is from 2014, also with an SSD and HDD. Each component has lasted all this time somehow. The total uptime of each drive is 11.5 years (101,023 hours) with 159 power cycles. The SSD is 256 GB and has 71 TB written, it's my main drive. It has 46% lifetime remaining, I hope everything lasts another 10+ years.
- binaryturtle 2mo agoMy SSD only reports as 121 GB. Dunno why it's such an odd size. With 21,647,615 MiB (~20.64 TiB) written. Reporting as 99 (down from initial 100?) in the normalised value, but the normalised value hasn't changed since I first checked in 2015, so maybe it doesn't work? The wear leveling is at 180 (down from initial 200?), and the threshold at 100, so still ~80 to go until expected EOL. I'm losing between 1 and 2 points per year at the current rate. I'm also hoping for another 10 years at least. *knock-on-wood*
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- vachina 2mo agoAnother useful advise would be to keep your boot drive 60% used at max and run TRIM after freeing a huge chunk of files to let the wear leveling algo do its job. And every few years reinstall the OS to free up unwritten cells.
- hn_throw2025 2mo agoA few years ago I decided to give up on sdcards for my main 24/7 homelab server. I now use a small SSD connected via USB3 and a slightly modified version of this : https://framps.github.io/raspiBackupDoc/introduction.html https://framps.github.io/raspiBackupDoc/introduction.html ...to take snapshots to my NAS periodically. I keep a similar small SSD in the drawer ready for a restore and swap if the main system drive fails.
- Venn1 2mo agoMy Raspberry Pi 4 has been used to run both a Jitsi and Trackmania server over the years. I never considered using the SD card since it can boot and run from a USB 3 flash drive. Later on, I picked up an Argon One case to add a SATA SSD. Thankfully, modern Rockchip SBCs tend to come with NVMe slots.
- taude 2mo agoIf i'm reading this correctly, can run Immich from a Raspberry Pi 4? That's pretty cool. I bought all the stuff (new case, networking card and a Jonsbro N4 to repurpose some intel i7-9700 era processor and motherboard, but didn't get it setup yet, as I was starting to rethink the power consumption.... Also looking to use this rebuild as an opportunity to learn Nix. Let me know if you all have some good article references, to point me at. I've been doing some research, but could always do more. I may end up putting a low power NUC in the case, or something. I don't know...
- Vedor 2mo agoYou can, I am self-hosting Immich via Docker on Raspberry Pi 4 with small SSD and it's nothing but good experience so far (but I keep the photos backed up elsewhere just in case, I use Immich mostly to share curated sets of photos)
- steinuil 2mo ago> If i'm reading this correctly, can run Immich from a Raspberry Pi 4? That's pretty cool. Yes! It runs completely fine on a Pi, except for the machine learning service. The good news is that you can run that service on a separate computer with a GPU and point Immich to it. Immich will use it when it's available and I think you can configure it to run all the queued ML jobs at a certain time when you expect the computer running the ML service to be on.
- ungreased0675 2mo agoI use a Waveshare hat for my Pi 5s. It does PoE and has a spot for an SSD. What I particularly like about this setup is the single wire running to each board, looks very clean.
- blfr 2mo ago> Not eager to ruin the evening by starting a debugging session Use a clanker. Nothing has brought back so much joy into homelabbing for me as having LLMs handle the boring stuff. I launch it in opencode on the system or elsewhere to ssh in (I think giving it KVM is an overkill but an option nonetheless) and tell it to fix things. Not just ask questions and generate configs. I have backups, let it rip. They have gotten shockingly good at it even when they write bash wrappers just to catch some logs.
- ranger207 2mo agoIf you're using a USB adapter on a Pi 4 you can use raspi-config to enable booting from an external drive and not worry about SD cards at all
- unanimous 2mo agoFor anyone trying this with a Pi older than the Pi 4, you might still need an SD card with one file on it: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberry-pi.html#special-bootcode-bin-only-boot-mode https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr...
- ozim 2mo agoWhat a great example of nice writing. I just liked reading it.
- not_the_fda 2mo agoThe RPi Compute Module is mush better with on board flash. Completely removes the SD Flash Achilles heel of the RPi.
- tonymet 2mo agoLack of proper IO connector is the reason I abandoned Raspi. SD card crashes are nearly a guarantee. Total pita too since there’s no display during the BIOS.
- mvanbaak 2mo ago> I chose to enable zram for swap swap is used when you run out of ram. using a ramdisk for swap ... You see how that doesnt make sense?
- schmeichel 2mo agoZram creates a compressed RAM disk. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram
- fuzzy2 2mo agoIt's also not the optimal choice in most situations: https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-what.html https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...
- mtzet 2mo agoThe main point is to use zswap over swap plus zram. The sd card usecase definitely doesnt want swap to disk, compressed or otherwise, so zram or no swap are the options.
- steinuil 2mo agoExactly. The previous install of the system had no swap at all so enabling zram is an improvement.
- mvanbaak 2mo agoMoving swap off of sdcard is indeed a good plan. But since swapping is done when ram is depleted, using a ramdisk for it (which uses ram) is ... exactly what you dont want. Since OP states they have disks attached to the machine as well, the better thing is use a partition there for swap.
- moebrowne 2mo ago> swap is used when you run out of ram This is not correct. Swap is not a RAM overflow. > Swap is not generally about getting emergency memory, it's about making memory reclamation egalitarian and efficient. In fact, using it as "emergency memory" is generally actively harmful. https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
- t0mpr1c3 2mo agoI've been running a CUPS server on a Pi Zero W since 2017. I suppose I should back up the SD card. Back in the day I ran s××× coin miners off flash drives without any apparent problems. Teslas though... ;)
- dzonga 2mo agothis would have been the perfect era for home servers - but damn Ram is expensive. every other component is cheap enough but not Ram.
- rjnz199 2mo ago[flagged]
- onel 2mo agoThat was a good read. But this is the kind of experience that makes technical people fall in love with self-hosting, but also keeps the majority of the population away. Most of the people don't want the hassle of managing a self-hosting box. I think a middle ground option might where someone hosts it for you, but you can also move to your own hardware at any time might be best