I am currently serving a photoprism instance for my self and the wife. I want to expand to have everyone’s home folder on the server. So we would have 5 home folders, all lunuxes. Anyway so I’m looking at some old servers that actually look pretty good.
HPE Proliant DL360 Gen9
I’ve been comparing it with other servers and it seems to be the easiest to use for the semi intrepid admin wannabe that I am. Is there anything better in the sub $300 range?
Cool; a lot of people are very concerned about power usage and thus it’s probably the most important thing to know making a recommendation.
If you don’t care, then you’re on a reasonable path. I ditched all my server-grade stuff a while ago for a single desktop build becase, well, I got tired of screaming computers, but your choice in server is decent at the price.
I would say, though, if you have NO experience in server hardware, expect to run into a bunch of oddities inherent in server platforms - they’re simliar but not exactly the same as what you’d find in consumer hardware in terms of hardware support but if all you want is computer + lots of drives + network access, then it’s probably not going to end up with any stupid things that break what you’re trying to do.
Yeah, currently I am running a few dockers. Photoprism, cloud key for my network, house inventory app, house scan app and a couple of other things. I’m using some tiny think centres and a larger one for the photoprism. The most demanding part of photoprism is the indexing stuff. That’s really where I think I could use dual processors.
In addition to that, I do blender rendering for optical systems and FEA using PrePoMax which uses calcilulix. I think I could do modeling work on my desktop and then set up the loud machine in the garage to run refer jobs or FEA solving jobs. My desktop is an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 I think, it’s not top of the line. It looks like the server I picked might have about the same amount of computing power?? Plus some extra. As is, the servers chug along but photoprism seems to reboot the computer every month or so, and I think it’s either crashing from peak use or maybe Ubuntu is auto updating and the computer is not set up to restart after power cycling.
I noticed the server hardware has really good networking and I want to take advantage of that running all my little services around.