Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q

I use an m920q as my router and it idles around 5W.

I live in the SF Bay Area, and ended up with Sonic Internet, and a 10gbe connection. Routing this with anything off the shelf was going to be "very expensive". I ended up with an Opnsense box. It's an m920q (i5-8500), with riser card and a dual SFP+ nic in it. All in, it was less than 200 bucks (now it would be closer to three). I ended up with a cheap, Chinese "media converter" (from aliexpress because the same thing on amazon is 3x the price) that just had two SFP+ ports on it. That let me go from an SPF+ copper ethernet module to a DAC and not dump a bunch of heat into the 1L pc. I have to say that the functionality made it a worth while investment: traffic shaping, wireguard and the like have been mostly a joy. And the documentation for Opnsense made the setup and use (mostly) easy.

You can definitely get PCIe on some micro PCs. I have a Lenovo m920q that I use with a Mellanox NIC as my router. You could certainly install a SAS or SATA controller, the issue would be having somewhere to mount the drives, and a way to power them. External SAS enclosures are not cheap.

I'm absolutely loving my ThinkCentre M920q, riser + Intel i350 NIC + ProxMox. I had not forayed into the wifi router world for over 10 years, and am amazed how much power, and how little power consumption, you can get for ~$150.

Typo in my first sentence about the Gen 8. it should be "Gen 8 cpu's in a USFF appear to deliver lower idle power usage and lower high end power usage than Gen 6/7." You're correct that some of these machines have desktop CPUs, what I discovered was they also have different classes of desktop CPUs. The m920q/m920s appear to have differnet power usages an possibly different cpus, or at least they're configured different. If I compare the two: - m920q (USFF) can go as high as 135w: https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCe... - m920s SFF can go as high as 260w: https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCe... Additionally, if you look up the Gen 6/7/8 power usage for the cpu itself, you can see the idle and total is different as well. The trick is Lenovo is far from the best priced USFF in this category for the same thing. When I bought Lenovo, I wanted to try out Proxmox, had no interest in fighting with installation or drivers, an just picked something that had flawless installation... that has since improved with other manufacturers. The tool from OP here is really cool - I'd probably add some from the spreadsheet I had built out but I haven't had to buy many more of these once I figured it out. Load them up with ram, a few ssds, a UPS and they're pretty solid.

Used Intel 8th gen based mini PCs seem like a pretty good value. 100-150 bucks for a pc from a somewhat reputable brand (lenovo, dell, hp) with slightly better multi core than N150 and ~6W idle if you manage to get it to stay in C10. Some of them have a low profile pcie slot, like M720q and M920q. Also the CPU is socketed so you could technically upgrade it to e.g. i9-9900K, at least the M920q is known to take one as long as you use a powerful enough PSU. Few of them (at least M920q) also support coreboot due to an Intel Boot Guard vuln which could be fun, I'm planning to look into whether it could be ported to my M720q as well.

It's nice to see a home lab on HN. Hardware has become a lost art for many. If you dont have a home lab, start one. Grab a 1l pc off of ebay. Think center m720q or m920q with an i5 is a great place to start. It will cost you less than 200 bucks and if you want to turn it into a NAS or an Opnsense box later you can. When it arrives toss Proxmox on it and get your toys from the community scripts section... it will let you get set up on 'easy mode'. Fair warning, having a home lab is an addiction, and will change how you look at development if you get into it deeply.

24U is about half a rack? 3 feet tall or so. Now, there can be a full length rack (or cage) that has 4 posts, or there's short racks too with just the front 2 posts that can shrink the footprint a lot. This is totally reasonable to find used most places. Noise and Power Consumption is a huge consideration. I think about it as cost of gpu or computing power per watt. While the information might not be out there, USFF devices like a one or a few Lenovo Thinkcentre m920q works pretty flawlessly with Proxmox or anything else. For a rack, they can be treated as quasi blade servers on a shelf stacked in a rack, or some cases as well. Again, up to most people These types of USFF devices often have a desktop grade cpu in a mobile setup that is engineering/industrial grade built, and 130w power supplies, and mostly idling. There are newer generations of these types of devices from most of the manufacturers too. Cost of electricity does add up, but more than that, keeping your wattage footprint low lets you use a more reasonable UPS for battery backup power, if there is a need, it can all stay up much, much longer.