HP 800 G2s - The Pi killers
I started on Elitedesk 800 G1s when Raspberry Pis got hard to find and expensive, and I now feel they are better in every respect if you don't need the GPIO pins.
Every time I open them up to upgrade something I'm impressed with the level of engineering. There are quality manufacturer manuals for them, the cooling is good and they look great
How's the power usage?
I normally only run one unless I'm doing some dev work, but one G2 plus a 4 bay NAS, a switch, a WAP, and a wireless modem and it sits on 30-55W. This is definitely part of the magic - I assume the i7 6700T is a laptop variant? The other two are i5 6500Ts
I've got a full stack of tiny/mini/micros running everything I have at home. I think I'm up to 9 now.
Great machines!
I don't understand the need for multiple PCs. Why not run everything from one or two?
well you have all 9 running then same thing, but if there's ever a disagreement, you have them vote...
that's why you always need an odd number of them
Not enough for what I have running.
Most of those are running Proxmox, clustered for high availability. I've got my media server, home assistant, DNS, wireguard, and all those general services running for HA, VMs running windows for me to remote into (work applications, some of which need specific environments or older versions of windows), VMs for testing application builds, VMs for my own testing fun, etc.
I've also got one of the in my living room running educational games for my kids, and one in my room for games (mostly emulated).
If I were to switch all this to server grade hardware, I could run it on less. But it would cost a lot more to buy, and would end up drawing way more power for the same tasks.
I started with three to allow for high availability clustering (under Proxmox), but really that's probably excessive for my situation. So now my production stuff is all on one, and backups go to the NAS. If PVE-Prod1 failed, I just turn the second one on and pull the VM's in from the NAS backups - takes a few minutes, and I actually run everything off it for a week every couple of months to ensure my recovery systems is all working.
The third one I use for software development and other testing of new services. I could have easily managed with two.
I have 2 small Dell micros and truenas+qdevice. I have two full replacements of those Dell micros just sitting powered off.
One proxmox Dell is for production. Reverse proxy+outward facing services. The other Dell is for dev/internal shit that i can break and rollback and not care. One is set to run until the UPS is almost dead, other one shuts down almost immediately.
It's just nice to have the options and the power draw is negligent.
We used these machines in production for years, some still out there. Great hardware.
I have one of these for my media server. And because it's got an i5 in it, it can handle transcoding and heavier demands when needed.
I haven't ever figured out how to pass in the QuickSync to my Jellyfin, but also have never had the need - seems to sit around 10-15% of two cores if it has to transcode something.
o0o0o i used to use a lot of these little things... rdp endpoints... can they be flashed with linux?
Yep! You can run almost anything on them, these are just x86 machines. However there are much smaller ones that aren't x86 and are actually proprietary ARM-based endpoints, but those are easy to spot usually as they don't have a lot of IO.
As for these ones though, people often repurpose them as low-power servers or firewall boxes.
There's an entire video series & articles called "Project TinyMiniMicro" where a server/homelab outlet ServeTheHome compares multiple popular models, looking at things like performance, cooling, upgradeability (some of these have half height PCIe slots inside), fan noise, thermal throttling, and a lot more.
Definitely worth a watch or a read if you're considering getting one of these, it's pretty comprehensive.
ive tossed hundreds, but i thunk ive got a box with a few around here somewhere. when i was using them i seeeemed to remember specifically picking the ones with a native windows rdp client, which would indicate x86. (win7 era)
im just looking to setup little media clients to connect to in-house flatscreens.
I have an HP 800 G4 arriving in the mail any day now. Right now I run most of my stuff on a pi3, including openvpn, transmission, minidlna, grafana, backuppc, and postgresql. I'm looking forward to porting all of that, plus suricata and dnsmasq, onto the G4 when it arrives.
You'll have so much more room for activities!
I have something very similar from Lenovo, bought refurbished and it's a very capable i5 home server. And it's practically silent.
I tossed up about the Lenovo's and probably only went with the HP's 'cause they were cheaper on ebay that week. I quite like how the Lenovo's look stood up.
Been running Home Assistant and several other apps on a G1 Mini for the last 4 years. Upgraded from a Pi and while I still love Pis the performance difference is night and day..
I had 3 HP Elitedesk 705 g4s and every single one of them after 100 hours would disconnect the SATA disk. Not sure if they newer ones are any better, but I kinda lost trust in HP mini pcs.