The noise problem is pretty easy to mitigate by choosing 2U servers instead of 1U. The latter are forced by the form factor to use smaller, higher speed fans.

A bigger issue for enterprise hardware is that it's optimized for performance per watt under load, not idle power consumption. Running a mostly-idle rack server 24/7 can result in a pretty sizable electric bill. This also depends heavily on the model. Some will idle at ~50 watts, others at ~300, but both of these are significantly higher than a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop which for personal use will generally do the job.

Business class desktops are also a good alternative here. Many models have pretty reasonable idle power consumption (check this for yourself, I've seen 6W but also 60W) and then you get a couple of drive bays and PCIe slots and expandable RAM which you don't get from a Raspberry Pi.

I sit next to my 4U server with all enterprise components apart from fans - these are consumer grade.

I had to mod the chassis slightly (with just pliers, tape and random inserts) to fit these fans in there, and add fans in front to push the air in. The PSU that came with it was obnoxiously loud, but thankfully, Supermicro has a quiet version that I can't even hear. Even if SM didn't have this PSU, I could have easily modified the PSU and fit some noctuas in there without any issue or safety concerns - like I did with my enterprise grade Mikrotik switch that also had obnoxious fans by default.

I even have an enterprise grade UPS that is dead silent when it's not running on battery power (I swapped the fans there too).

I essentially try to buy enterprise gear whenever possible. Not only is it usually much better than the consumer alternative, but it also is frequently much cheaper too because of second hand market. Before AI sucked the soul out of the hardware market in general, you could have bought enterprise SSDs that had life expectancy - TBW - measured in petabytes, and MTFB - practically never - for half the price of the top consumer SSD that had TBW measured in tens of TB and MFTB of yesterday.

And the entire rack is just slightly more louder than the PC I was using.

The only consumer grade computer at my home is my MacBook and my phone.

Kind of a random aside, but I never realized how obnoxious LEDs were until I got a studio apartment and started sleeping in the same room as my homelab / workstation / networking hardware. Electrical tape saved me, but wow. You sure can produce a lot of light with a milliwatt of electricity :)

(And yes, my workstation has a clear case and LED RAM. Yes, I'm an idiot. Whenever Windows applies an update late at night, I wake up if it turns back on. I don't know what I was thinking when I built that thing, but never again.)

You can make those rackmounted servers as loud or as quiet as you like. For home, optimize quiet (and low power consumption).

Even though my server rack is in the garage I try to keep it quiet. A couple of them are fanless Atom-based and others have fans but they are built to be quiet. If you need hardware that generates a lot of heat, go with 4U for large fans that spin slow, thus low noise.

The "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet" happens when you stuff a lot of heat generation into a 1U chassis that then requires lots of tiny fans running at full speed. Those you don't want at home! But it is easy to avoid. Data centers do this to maximize density, but that's unlikely to matter at home.

You can buy server boards that don’t require loud fans. If you’re buying used server gear from a datacenter then it will be like what you said.

I have a 4U NAS with a supermicro board and an i3 chip with 6 WD Red NAS drives and it’s very quiet. The chassis came without fans so I installed the brand I like.

You're right, I may have significantly over-estimated the percentage of people on hn that have dealt with server hardware. It's expensive, big, loud, power hungry and temperature sensitive.

> my 1U

1Us have the most compromised ventilation and compensate with loud fans running at high speeds.

I built PCs for a number of years and then I shifted to some combinations of RPis, MacBooks, and (maybe) Mac Minis. It was a (long) phase that involved quite a bit of money as well as frustration oftentimes but almost certainly not going to do it again.

I had to provision a 1U server in grad school. Turing that thing on in the office was a joke. Completely impossible to work with it on if you were anywhere in that part of the office.

This. At one company we ran out of space in the server room, so the excess machine temporarily landed next to my desk. Dear god. Noise cancelling headphones couldn't cope with the noise.

Reminds me of when I as a kid got one of those Delta 7000rpm fan powered cpu coolers, my mom promptly asked what it would cost to make that noise (that was heard in the entire apartment) go away. Got a Zalman (back when they were great) and everything was good.

It was a learning experience, and I think everyone should experience that kind of industrial noise at least once to appreciate how quiet consumer hardware is.

I think this is already happening, sort of. At least, people are hanging onto their older-but-not-yet-old components for much longer than they used to. I recently tried to build a NAS from eBay parts, and I was surprised to find that the newest stuff affordably available was 6th/7th generation Intel Core parts (retailed 2016/2017). I think people are trying to offload these CPUs in particular because they can't run an unmodified Windows 11 installation (no firmware TPM 2.0 implementation, and the corresponding consumer motherboards typically didn't have a discrete TPM module, either, if they had an LPC bus connector at all). Very little (reasonably-priced) availability of similar-aged Ryzen CPUs (which have firmware TPM support) or newer Intel CPUs.

That's what I've been doing for years. I buy (or get for free) enterprise PCs coming off lifecycle at surplus sales. Nothing I do at home needs a cutting edge CPU. Unless you're a hard-core gamer or serious hobbiest/tinkerer a 5 year old or even older PC running linux is very adequate.

Ziply Fiber is offering 50 gbps home internet connections in some US locations. You cannot utilize that type of speed with a Mac Mini. Even the modest 8-10gbps connections offered by T-Mobile and Google probably require more.

Great take, but if the market is expanding for capable PCs why are motherboard sales decreasing?

why?

I'm interested to know, WHY is PC so open? what led to that?

I recommend this too!

I like my Dell Precision T7910 (dual-socket Xeon FTW) a lot.

What are you using?