I’m currently facing a dilemma. Right now, I have a synology NAS that I use to host my homelab containers (*arr, pi-hole, vaultwarden, Plex, etc).
I am planning to offload as much of that as possible to a dedicated machine, which hopefully will allow me to continue self-hosting even more demanding services (Immich, etc).
I was lucky enough to get a proper server - Supermicro, for free, with 64GB Ram DDR4 and 1TB. However, I plugged it in and that thing is NOISY.
My rack will be in the home office, where I will spend at least 8 hours a day, so I can’t afford that level of noise.
What should I do? Should I try to sell the supermicro and buy something else with that money? Should I keep the RAM and SSD (and CPUs?) and build something else with them? Are there any quiet servers I could look into (I am guessing better performance but more expensive), or Should I go the MiniPC route instead (cheaper and smaller, but more limited specs)?
What is the form factor? See if you can just get a new case for it. You can always under clock a system to make it use less power, workstation cases are quieter than servers.
Noise is almost always the fans. Servers are supposed to take a little space as possible and depend on super high airflow from a cold room.
With the cost of components you are going to have a hard time selling a system to buy a different one. 64gb of ram is pretty sweet for a home server. You can do all sorts of silly stuff and still have a responsive system.