'This Is The ONLY Home Server You Should Buy'

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Want to make a copy of my spreadsheet?
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Music (in order):
"If You Want To" - Me
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Timestamps:
0:00 The ONLY Home Server... according to YouTube comments
0:50 Squarespace (Sponsor)
1:37: Why Don't I Use N100s?
2:02 Kamrui AK2 Plus Mini
5:49 Performance & Benchmarks
7:00 Efficiency & Power Draw
7:27 Home Server with Debian/CasaOS
7:47 HW Transcoding
8:19 Minecraft Server and Potential CPU Limitations
8:45 Power Draw as Home Server
9:42 Is This ACTUALLY More Affordable?
12:27 Is The N100 Better For The Environment?
17:58 Are N100 Mini PCs a Good Purchase?

[eldibs]

There's a reason why "recycle" is at the bottom of "reduce, reuse, recycle" list. Reusing existing computers is better than manufacturing new ones, unless there's a massive efficiency gap. Especially if they're being powered by clean energy.

[rossm]

The fake out around 9 minutes in, leading into the spreadsheet calculators for both long-term costs and CO2 emissions is why I appreciate your content! This is the type of information so many tech channels skim over with newer technologies, so I’m glad you care to dive into the facts.

[Begemp]

Thank you for this video! I always appreciate when people don't discount the footprint of producing so many devices (with complex and harmful supply chains) that usually are destined for a landfill after 5-10 years of office use. It's easy for people to focus over minute idle wattage differences and lose the forest for the trees.

[collincutler]

Thanks for this video! I loved the second half when you dug deeper into calculating the 'real' cost of a new pc vs using an older less efficient one. Videos like this makes me proud to support you!

[jarthurs]

As someone who is currently hosting a mail/web server on a Dual Atom 330 board from 2009 I appreciate your more in-depth view rather than chasing the newer = better. I'm hoping to upgrade soon to a second hand USFF PC then I can move my Home Assistant off of the ancient Celeron laptop into a container on the new machine.

[luisross]

Just got this video randomly recommended, and I totally loved this review taking into consideration the environmental impact of the manufacturing, and operating costs into the costs analysis, subscribed

I would love to see more videos diving into these subjects, you could probably reach a broader audience by simply showing the results using a bar plot that compares the real emissions and real cost of a product

[TechHut]

I've been using an Intel N95 the last few months on a daily basis in a laptop. It preforms surprisingly well. Cant wait to see this chip start to replace Celerons.

[xybersurfer]

good job. i love the focus on wattage and CO2 footprint, even if they were rough estimates. the wattage cost calculation is something i typically do too

[slavic_gecko]

I took a lot of interest in the second half of your video. Definitely makes me want to research my rough energy footprint just for the heck of it.

Love your content, keep it up!

[pawepiat]

The 3R's - reduce, reuse, recycle. In this order. So reusing old stuff is usually better then recycling it.

[eccodreams]

And this is why I love your channel. Talking about *all* the facets of a little box like this. Loved the breakdown of environmental impact between this guy and that old 6500T system.

[Itsallfun]

This is a good shout and a good calculation. I have an old lenovo x260. It will idle at 4w and with a couple of drives on it it will get up to 20 or so when transcoding but i think its doing very well. Thanks for looking at the euro prices, i really didnt expect that vision from someone in the states i appreciate that. My elec is 27p kwh. I think in the grand scheme of things the numbers arent a concern really. As a perspective i measured my old athlon 1800 desktop "retro" machine and it idles at 100w before you do anything at all so we are winning either way.

[MarcoGPUtuber]

To be honest, the N100 from my own perspective is a terrible option for a NAS/home server CPU. It's incredibly expensive at $128 US. The Celerons are much much cheaper at $30-40 and provide very good performance for the money, while the Ryzen Embedded CPUs only cost somewhat more than this N100 and come with SO MANY MORE PCI Express lane, I tell everyone that asks me to put the N100 in the NASes here at work that we're putting something better in.

[phsouzabr]

Thank you for the analysis at the end! I got into recycled mini pcs and laptops last year and won't go back to buying new hardware again ... there's so much good second hand stuff out there that gets the job done perfectly fine.

[fiveangle]

It would have been very useful to run one day with a fixed set of tasks on each system to get real-world daily KWh usage. As it is, that's the big question that none of us can answer without building both systems and trying it ourselves. But good work to bring more factors to the discord !

[diotough]

The question is: do you want a used machine or do you have an old one around? If not then you need to buy something new and at that point there's hardly any better option available than the N100 (or N200 sibling). Reliability of old hardware is also a factor - depending on your intended use it might even be a very important factor, e.g. in a NAS.

For a small home server I would go for the ASRock N100M mainboard: 2 PCIe Slots (1 PCIe 3.0 16x/2x and 1 PCIe 3.0 1x/1x), 1 M.2/M-Key (PCIe 3.0 2x), 1 M.2/E-Key (Intel CNVi), 2 SATA on board - and it's fully passive. That board is somewhere around 120-140 bucks. Hard to find any board+cpu combo that is cheaper. Throw in a SAS/SATA HBA on the PCIe 3.0 16x slot (running it with 2x should be sufficient for up to 8 mechanical drives - ~194MB/s per drive of bandwidth, mechanical drives don't saturate that) and a 10G fibre adapter on the PCIe 3.0 1x slot (yes, it will be limited in bandwidth but you're still getting real ~6-7Gbps of data bandwidth out of it after considering encoding: PCIe 3.0 1x has 0.985GBps of bandwidth with 128b/130b line code, that's ~7.76Gbps and now it depends on the protocol overhead and encoding). NVMe or SATA M.2 as system drive and you can use the on board SATA ports either as SSD Cache drives or additional ports if SATA is enough for you and you want more than 8 drives (which is A LOT - using 12TB drives with 2 drives parity in RAID-Z2 will give you ~60TiB of usable storage or ~71TiB in RAID-Z1).

Any even remotely efficient CPU costs already like >80 bucks - and then we're looking at TDPs of 25-35W and not 6W: The Pentium Gold G6405T, Pentium Gold G6505T and the Pentium Gold G7400T on team blue and the Ryze 5 Pro 3350GE on team red (for about as much as the whole N100 board) - unless you want to move to the Athlon chips but even then you only get a tray Athlon 3000G for less - if you can still find both team red chips anywhere because they are old. And none of those options are passively cooled.

There's just no alternative to the N100/N200 systems available on the market at that price point with that efficiency.

And as a media device: there're little options fo fan-less barebones with WiFi6 support, at least HDMI 2.0 (you want that for your media center as it supports 4k/60 without compression and it supports HDR starting from rev. a) and up to 15W CPU TDP. At least in Europe you're left with 3 N100 barebones (2x Zotax ZBOX, 1x ASUS ExpertCenter), 1 N200 (1x ASUS ExpertCenter) and 2 Celeron N4500 that are 2c/2t (2x ASUS Mini PC). Shrink it down to release dates since 2023 and the Celerons are gone from the list.

Those little N100 and N200 systems are REALLY interesting.

[fridaycaliforniaa]

Omg ! I'm only a very recent follower of your channel (and I discovered it by pure randomness), but man, I wish more youtubers did the maths you did at the end ! (costs, environmental impact, etc.) This is a real plus that we don't see often (if ever) on other channels !

That's a great channel for sure that I just discovered ! Now, I'm gonna have to watch the other videos ! =)

[lurtz]

I really like the in-depth analysis of power consumption and co2 emissions with the spreadsheets.

[wofwof]

I really appreciate the breakdown - power & environment-wise. I think another advantage with buying a much cheaper older system - is the fact that you can even get a 2nd one - to act as a backup / hot spare and still be under the cost of a new one.

[taavikiisk]

Seeing the sustainability calculations was interesting. Thanks for including that!