I am currently looking for Thin Clients on ebay to use as my main server instead of the RPi 4 with an external USB drive.
I found decent offers for:
- Dell Optiplex 3020M with i5-4590T 4GB RAM 120GB SSD
- Dell Wyse 5070 with Celeron J4105 or Pentium Silver J5005 both with 8GB RAM 64GB SSD
Given the current prices of new hardware my questions are:
- Should I go for 8GB RAM?
- Or are 4GB RAM fine and I should take double the storage?
Things I want to run on this server:
- Karakeep
- FreshRSS
- Paperless-NGX or Papra
- Immich
- Booklore
Because I plan to mostly use podman I tried to check for virtualization and all three suppoert Intels VT-x technolgy, will that be fine for my use case?
Just throwing this in here as another thing to consider - instruction set. From a quick check (so I’m happy to be told I’m wrong) the Celeron & Pentium options don’t support AVX. That means some stuff - and I’m giving a hard stare at MongoDB here, but there will be others - is not going to run, or at best you’re going to be either stuck with old versions or recompiling yourself from source.
(I don’t know if any of your apps require Mongo or AVX, but I was bitten by this in the past and it was one of the main reasons I eventually upgraded one of my small clusters.)
I think I never heard about AVX before, what is it? And is it a newer technology or why do they both don’t support it?
Advanced Vector Extensions instruction set; introduced with Sandy Bridge in 2011, but not included in Pentium/Celeron branded processors even after then for reasons best known only to Intel.
Mongo is the application that has most irritated me by requiring it, but I doubt it’s the only one.