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ARM box as home server replacement: 6 month report

VPS Hosting by HieuTce 24 replies 2.3K views
HieuTce

Member OP

10 #1

So six months ago I finally pulled the trigger on this whole ARM migration thing and decommissioned my old Intel NUC that had been chugging along since 2019 and honestly the power numbers are what sold me and what kept me going when I hit the one weird USB snag and I should probably start with the setup and I went with a 4-core ARM box from Contabo and I slapped 8GB of RAM in there and a 256GB NVMe and the whole thing idles at like 3.2W which is just absurd compared to the NUC pulling 12-15W at idle and 28W under load and I ran it for a month side by side and I was seeing maybe 8W peak on the ARM box and the NUC would spike to 35W easy and I did the math and over six months at my local rates thats about $18 saved and over three years thats pushing $110 and the box was only $89 so it pays for itself and then some and I moved all my usual stuff over and Plex works fine with transcoding d

LichunLars

Member

#2
HieuTce said:
So six months ago I finally pulled the trigger on this whole ARM migration thing and decommissioned my old Intel NUC that had been chugging...
Route via my NUC adds 14ms to Vultr compared to the ARM box. Ran traceroutes for a week.

ARM:   8.2ms avg, 7.1ms min, 11.4ms max, 0.3ms jitter
NUC:  22.4ms avg, 19.8ms min, 31.2ms max, 1.1ms jitter

Same cable, same switch. NUC's older NIC driver stacks extra processing. Your power savings are real, latency bonus is real.

1ms or I don't want it
RA

Member

#3

Peering @HieuTce

Nice cfg. Fw offloading on that soc? V6 prefix stable? Seen bgp flaps on arm fw from Hetzner, rt weirdness.

Usb: fw log says anything? Xhci err? Or just silent drop

JokoNord

Member

#4

Made similar move to ARM last year from old desktop, very happy with power bill. USB issue is strange thing, never seen with 17 minute exactly. Maybe try different kernel from RackNerd repo? They have mainline build for similar board. Good luck bro and thank you again for detailed writeup 🙏

traffic worse than my packet loss
adam20

Member

Ex-Abuse Desk

#5

This one read "user reports SDR stops receiving after 17 minutes, suspects hardware defect, demands replacement" always the same chip, always the same timeout. One guy threatened chargeback because we "sold him a defective nuclear radiation detector." it was a weather radio dongle.

reported. resolved. repeat.
GR

Member

#6

Which Contabo model? Their 4-core lineup's a mess

HA

Member

#7

Latency bonus is real. My ARM fw shaved 8ms off

SS

Member

#8

3.2W at the wall or soc reported

HieuTce

Member OP

#9

sslman762 said:
3.2W at the wall or soc reported
Wall. Measured with a cheapo P3 Kill-A-Watt clone from Lazada, so give or take 0.2W maybe. The BMC itself reports 2.8W but I don't trust that number, feels like it's not counting the NVMe controller fully.

GR

Member

#10

HieuTce said:
I went with a 4-core ARM box from Contabo
Their ARM lineup is VPS ARM 4, VPS ARM 6, and VPS ARM 8. The 4 is Ampere Altra, the 6 and 8 are different stepping. You probably got the 4 since you mentioned 8GB RAM. I tried all three before settling on the 6-core for my Plex thing, the 4 had weird USB resets under load that the 6 doesn't. Same chipset family, different board revision maybe.

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