STH Project TinyMiniMicro Home Lab Revolution Introduction

STH Project TinyMiniMicro is set to revolutionize the home lab segment with clusters of high-quality, quiet, low power, and inexpensive nodes. We have purchased tons of second-hand Lenovo Tiny, HP Mini, and Dell Micro nodes to see what each offers in terms of power, performance, noise, and expansion. In this series, we are going to cover the nodes themselves, but also important aspects of the lifecycle including purchasing second-hand units.

By purchasing so many, we have found a number of variations and deviations from what we would have otherwise expected. In the process, we found that these units offer enormous value, but there were a lot of pitfalls (and nice surprises) to purchasing so many used units. Our goal over the series is to help you understand what to look for so you can learn from our mistakes purchasing a large population of these.

Other STH References in this piece

[stevefxp]

I believe I got onto this channel when you did a review of the older HP/AMD desktops, as a cheap fw/router. I kept at it and ended up buying a HP Deskpro 600 SFF desktop for my new OPNsense firewall. I paid a total of $300 for a desktop with a i5-7600, 1TB SATA drive, 8 gig RAM, and an add in 4 port Ethernet card.

Great value!!

[basementchemistry]

Thank you for doing this series, these old office PCs are a goldmine but there is NO information on them anywhere.

[zadekeys]

Wish that more of these had dual Lan... Would make a great base for an Untangle or Pfsense firewall

[eDoc]

For low-compute needs laptops can also work well. You get an integrated UPS and local management console. They're probably not as good a choice overall as these micro desktops but if you can get them more easily...

[johnmcquay]

I love these things. I've used them running Kodi in the past, and they're great for it. Now, I have just the one and it's running Sangoma FreeBBX; never missed a beat.

[darkpalidin]

I'm a big fan of using second-hand hardware for home labbing reasons. I'm still rocking 3 Dell Optiplex 7010's and a PowerEdge T320 in mine. And they are solid!

[TerraMagnus]

This project could be a whole web site by itself.

This project fueled my ambitions to set up a high-availability bare metal Kubernetes cluster up in my home (not because I *need* that, per se, but this is what I want to learn... and I can put it to good use). I'll be using some HP ProDesk machines I got for about $150 a pop for the control nodes and the etcd cluster. But then some of the EliteDesk 705 G4 nodes with Ryzen 5 as workers.

[ItsKingMyles]

i love these machines, we use them everywhere where i work

[rysliv]

We use HP ProDesk 600 Minis heavily where I work. We even use them for some of our business critical systems that need to be on 24/7 in the server room. They are very reliable and we almost never have issues with them.

[edwardgreenjr]

Can't wait for follow-up videos. A dedicated one showcasing the best use-cases in these for a home or small business network would be awesome.

[ytxzw]

Man, you gave me to thing about something... That WSL stealth hosting approach may actually work for me 🤣🤣🤣🤣 Thanks!

[samuelschwager]

I use a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q as a media center, pretty happy with it.

[alphenit]

Patrick cornering the market on minimicro servers awesome!

[JeremyMarkel]

I recently purchased three Lenovo M900s for a Proxmox cluster with ceph and they work great in my lab environment. Cheap HCI.

[mrsjarclovis]

I can't wait to see what this series has in store. I inherited 4 HP t620s and 4 HP t630 thin clients that I plan on running in a Proxmox cluster and can't wait to see what you do with these little beasts!

[dtaggartofRTD]

Pis being unobtanium what led me to this channel. At the price the scalpers are asking these are a great alternative. Planning on using something like this to run Octoprint for a small print farm.

[undisclosedmusic]

Your opinion about Youtube falling under professional productivity differs substantially from my employer’s

[lapptech]

Using a Fujitsu Esprimo with a Pentium G645 and a dual Intel server-nic I bought for about $99 years ago as pfsense-box, it's been rock solid for like 4 years now.

[woolfy]

Those proliant microservers are nice! I currently run a Pi 4 with ProxMox but, I'm needing more CPU power. (And as quiet as it can get it). Great video!

[MySmartHomeDomain]

I have been using the Lenovo Tiny M72e and M92p for small home server applications for a while. I am currently using Tiny M73's with I7-4285T cpu's for media server applications. The beauty of the Tiny models are that you can swap CPU's for faster better CPU's such as the I7 T model cpus. I currently have a M910q and waiting for a cheap I7-7700T to appear cheap (or try one of the ES on ebay)