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)?


I switched to a M4 Mac Mini as my home server and it is amazing. Virtually silent, incredibly powerful, yet insanely power efficient.
What software stack are you running on it though? Asahi doesn’t seem to support the M4, yet.