Hey guys, I was wondering if any of you have experience running their services on a Lenovo ThinkCentre, specifically a Lenovo ThinkCentre M70Q Gen1? From what I read they can be quite efficient when it comes to idle power draw.
I have the chance to buy a refurbished one for approx. €380, coming with a i5-10400T, 16 GB RAM and a 256 GB NVMe SSD. Do you guys think the price sounds fair?
I am mainly looking to expand my Proxmox single host setup comprising of an Intel N150 mini PC with a second node as backup. Maybe down the line if I can get my hands on another affordable mini PC I might dabble in setting up a Kubernetes cluster. But that’s a project for another day 😄
I’m hosting most of my homelab off one m910q I got off eBay, with a 128gb M.2 SSD I bought separately. $55usd total. It handles around 15 services (including DNS and *Arrs) pretty well. Using a separate NAS for the actual storage and Plex streaming.
Seems kind of pricey for that specific unit, but it should work well for just hosting simple services.
second this… I get quoted that in CAD… op should be closer to like 200£
I have 2 of them with older 6 core CPUs and 32gb each. I also added a 10g SFP card in the PCIe slot so they would have a bit more umph.
For 380 each I would not bother, and I would look at the Minisforum MS-01 as it has built in dual 10g SFPs and dual 2.5g RJ45’s plus a PCIe slot.
https://minisforumpc.eu/products/ms-01?_pos=1&_psq=MS&_ss=e&_v=1.0
at ~80 euro’s more you get more CPU, faster ram if you can find it, more storage, and more networking.
Are those custom 3d printed rack mounts for the ThinkCentres? Got an STL to share? I’d love to print rack mounts for mine (m910q)
I may, it was a massive work in progress that I never finished because life decided to beat the crap out of me for the last 3 years. I was trying to build a modular system that was 19" and 10" rack compatible and would have storage options as well. In this case its 2x Seagate external drives, and a WD external drive plugged in via USB3 and setup in a CEPH cluster.
That looks nice, what sort of a container box is this? I always had just boxes all over the place, but now in a house where I got a chance to put it all into a neater place. So looking for something like your box there. Also appreciate any kind of price guide for it.
The wall mount rack is a used ACP Netshelter. I was able to find it on Craigslist a few years ago. The rackmount face plates are custom 3d printed but unfinished as I abandoned the project due to life.
Nice setup! Is that a Minisforum below the optiplex?
Haha I read your comment the wrong way around the first time thinking you got a Minisforum MS-01 for like €460. That would have been a great deal 😄
Because searching for what a new MS-01 with i5 and 32gb RAM and 1TB SSD cost is more towards €700. Haven’t found a lot of offerings for a used one in my region and buying new currently I think I would have to pay too much.
Yes thats the MS-A1 which is a great little box but not as flexible as the MS-01. It lacks the PCIe slot, and only has 2x 2.5g Ethernet ports.
You probably wont find the MS-01 used since its not like the Lenovo’s with their mass market deployment as office PCs.
As for price, https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256810143174659.html? I was looking at the barebones since the prices on DDR5 and NVME’s are nuts right now. I have spare NVME drives so all I would need is RAM and I can find it cheaper than the resellers who mark it up when they install it for you.
I have a lot of services running on m90q with i5-6500t and 32GB ram. I got it for ~170$. CPU is definitely a bottleneck, especially with jellyfin transcoding but it only occurs when watching something immediately after importing. i5-10400t is a lot better than mine so I am sure you wont have any problems with normal usage. M70q is selling for around 350$ in my area.
That sounds pretty expensive, I got 3 M90q Gen 3 with the 12500T in 2023 for 350€ each, but I guess the current situation with the AI craze has brought their prices up quite a bit, better look at the minisforum
I use a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q to host both Minecraft (Java edition) and Vintage Story server. I think that your ThinkCentre have a better CPU (mine is an i5 like, 6 gen), so, easily you could host many things without issue.
Ah nice, another vintage story aficionado 👌 Have my server running on my mini pc in a LXC since a couple of weeks, sadly haven’t found a lot of time exploring v1.21 since becoming a dad last year 😄
But yeah was looking for a bit beefier server hardware to maybe run some more game servers like Valheim or Satisfactory besides my other selfhosting services.