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I’ve been running my Plex server on one of these with a 4th gen i7 for years. Still going strong.
Is there a good way to slim down the amount / volume of power bricks laying around?
Bigger powerbricks with splitters perhaps?
I have some of those, and some Dell’s Optiplex as well
What’s the power brick situation with newer HP? I always seem to see refurbs that are missing the brick on eBay or FB. In fact I’m sure I use the same brick between a old hp laptop and my hp mini.
High wattage 19.5V 7.4mm are usually harder to find. Most common are 65W chargers.
HP uses two different voltages for the 7.4mm black tipped chargers: 19V and 19.5V. Not sure if both will work with the latest gen mini PCs but 19V chargers will work for these. I’ve had a hard time looking for 120W 19.5W chargers that 705 G1 minis used that I had to resorted to using 19V ones.
Their laptops use the smaller 4.5mm blue tipped chargers. Makes sense since these laptops are too thin.
You should try maas.io for managing those bad boys
Do those have VT-D and can they accept a decent amount of ram like 16GB or so? Very tempting to build a Proxmox cluster if I can find some here in Canada.
Look for a Lenovo M720Q, M920Q, or M330. All of them not only do VT-D and IOMMU but even have a real PCIe x8 slot. I picked up an M720Q for $220 CDN off FB Marketplace and it’s my Proxmox server running pfSense, Window Server 2016, Turnkey-NAS (using an 8TB and a 16TB USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps external hard drives), Pi-Hole, and a battery backup monitor LXC.
I have 32GB RAM in it, but even though the docs say that’s the maximum I’ve been told by several people that you can actually put two 32GB modules in them for a total of 64GB. When the M720Q was released 16GB was the biggest RAM module you could get.
No cluster yet, but someday…
Any solutions to reducing the amount of power bricks for devices like this? I have two of these PCs in a small cupboard along with router, modem, 8 port switch and external USB hard drive. The devices themselves sound take up much space but I have 8 devices with varying sizes power bricks in the same tiny cupboard
A lot of these devices are above 12v so with that said yes it can be done but it would require a special power supply that puts out enough watts and enough volts at whatever the voltage is cut the power ends leaving the ferrite on make sure you keep center Pin Positive or Negative whatever they are or meter to find positive and negative before you fully cut them off the bricks and viola a power supply. I’m guessing a lab power supply would likely come close to what you need its adjustable in voltage and amperage.
I’m currently in the stages of taking the other route I want multiple cores and virtual machines = less electricity. Looking at getting cloudmin running only 75 big ones a year less than I would spend on having another rig up a whole year. IDK just seems like it’d be the way to roll if you ask me beef up one server run KVM and viola done deal. Everything managed from any TV in any room of the house with a video network and a switch 4k management of multiple servers with a single server sipping electricity. The savings in electric will pay for the expense over time. So no point in cheaping out here. Bit of a curve at the moment but I’ll get there.
Perhaps, i tried reading up about it, looks like HP will not just accept 19V and needs some sort of verification of the power supply’s capabilities. It will just run in “Low power mode” if only 19V is supplied and no data signal
Honestly those pre-Ryzen AMD chips are shit, power hungry and not powerful at all.
Yeah they aren’t the most powerful chips, but it will work for what i need and i don’t pay for power here, so honestly it’s fine for me
Had the same at my dorm room. After a while the university started to measure the consumption of every flat and we got a separated bill. Suddenly everybody removed their second fridge (which was usually only for beer). Sad times
I lived in a dorm room at uni. And we didn’t pay for electricity in the common areas. One christmas they turned off the heating for some reson. I got so frustrated I turned on the ovens in the kitchen and opened them up to heat the kitchen/living area. Which worked. But it was probably not cheap for them after a few days :)
I have a few of these pc’s but i have no idea what to do with it. One runs my home assistant but i could run that on my other server with truenas…
I have the same question. We are about to sunset about 20 of these at work. I could take them but would have no clue what to do with them. I have zero interest in learning Kubernetes as the network I sysadmin for is so dirt simple as far as servers go. VMWare cluster maybe? Proxmox cluster?
Proxmox cluster. And you can run all your services in LXC containers instead. And not have to bother with docker? And have cetralized storage to your NAS?
Lucky you. These are fun machines!
I have been living under a rock lately. Is this the new homelab meta, building a k8s cluster of mini PCs?
Honestly I have no clue why you’d need a cluster at home either. But I guess it’s fun to tinker? A raspberry pi cluster would be cheaper though and have the same result.
The fact Pi prices have been so high is what has driven everyone down the mini pc route. Cheaper, more expandable and more performant.
Cheaper*
* If you live in a cheap used tech market area