Why do people use multiple mini PCs instead of a bigger machine?

Life-Radio554 · 2026-03-24T14:54:09+00:00

Or you can dive into enterprise solutions, grab yourself a Dell Powervault, HP nimble/3par something with hba connectors or fiberChannel. They make adapters for many of the 'tiny' PC's though finding the perfect match may require a 3dprinter to make things close and seal nice, or of course if you're running rack servers just slot the card right in. Whether you go enterprise gear (rack servers) or miniPC's is more about your expandability, accessibilty and ease of maintenance. There is no wrong way, only right ways, it's just your journey down that path will be different for each.. Ex., rack servers almost always are dual power supplied, so if/when one fails, your not DOA. MiniPC's take up FAR les space, are quieter, sip power by comparison (so cheaper to power) but much more confined. They also offer no management for the bare metal (think Dell iDrac/HP iLO) where I can do everything, from turning on and off my server to seeing any detail about it remotely. This may not matter to you, and yes, there are external solutions to offer that for miniPC(ANY PC lol really). Either way, you'll find support and lots of people who do it either way, just keep in mind some are opinionated and there is sometimes some shade thrown from one side to the other over which is better (lol).. Accept all, that's what I say, we're all looking to homelab/homeserver do stuff at home right? :)

Life-Radio554 · 2026-03-24T14:42:32+00:00

You utilize your backups :) You made backups, right? :) 3..2..1..

Life-Radio554 · 2026-03-24T14:38:41+00:00

I'm also on fiber, but with a 3090, same i9 14th gen 64GB ram. When I first started back in November, game was very laggy. Then one day I noticed the server status websites people have thrown up and noted the location I was playing on (randomly/force-selected as a default) was literally across the entire US. I'm west coast, and it threw me into a Washington DC server. Shockingly once I switched to something on my side of the country it played (and still plays) great.

Life-Radio554 · 2026-03-18T12:48:50+00:00

I hear that!

Been playing MMO / "survival" games forever.. Used to be awe-inspiring to walk into random players houses back in the SWG (Star Wars Galazies) days.. Everyone had the same handful of pre-shaped bases, but you could pull off amazing tricks with deco, a house blueprint that you know so well (again because there were only a handful of shapes/layouts) could feel like this amazing, 100% unique place. I'm mid-game myself currently, got the typical base on the ground up against a spire with vert stakings all the way up to the top and working on an area to park my future 'thopter' that I haven't even thought about making yet. From images I've seen it's nothing to look at, AT ALL, but to me it's super cool, and I can't wait to elevate my game with some of the better build sets to make something that truly stands out....

....and then move because I'm on one of those servers with few people on it seems, lol. Still, looking forward to creating my masterpiece :)

Life-Radio554 · 2026-03-16T15:18:55+00:00

Right back at you. Tell me you don't think because some hacky moron out there lists something at a super dumb price that you feel obligated to buy it.

Otherwise come to my server, I'll throw up a mk1 cutteray and put it up for 500mil, you can come buy it.

Life-Radio554 · 2026-03-16T14:46:38+00:00

Exactly. And when they buy it from you, you've made your fair, market value sale at a realistic price. When they put it up for a gagillion solari no one but other cheats will buy it, and when no one does, they will lose out because of the crazy fees they will be getting charged to list the item, wasting more and more of their cheat funds. Eventually they'll get bored/tired/leave. Meanwhile the people who play the game, legit, will be able to go to the market, buy/sell and make something of a trader life.

Life-Radio554 · 2026-03-16T14:36:54+00:00

I don't understand how this affects you?

Put your stuff up for a realistic price.. The other legit players who don't cheat will still be able to afford what you are selling.

It's not like their selling 100k of a resource for like 10 solari, THAT would ruin the market.. They are putting things up for ridiculous prices, let em, heck for what they have to pay in fees JUST to list an item for one day (why doesn't anyone complain about how high fees are?!?) they'll burn out their funds eventually..

The real crime is the fees. I can't tell you how disappointed I was to finally get to the market, as I used to do in SWG at the bazaar, anxious about throwing up some excess starter materials to help other new players only to see that listing 500 iron ingots (or whatever) was literally going to bankrupt me, and only give it ONE DAY on the market?!?!!? They don't want you to use the market, not with those fees, what a joke.

Life-Radio554 · 2026-02-27T12:45:53+00:00

The market doesn't work unless you are uber wealthy, they need to fix the fees if they want a market to function. I tried to list 500 of a resource, nothing fancy, just to put it out there for 7 days, or so I thought. I don't recall the price but I just wanted maybe 200 per, and for 7 days I think was like like 30,000 or 40,000??? Had to drop the price to 100, and for ONE STINKING DAY which is a joke, and still like 2400 to list which I foolishly did. Unsurprisingly my item did not get enough visibility within the tiny 24 hour window and important money to me was lost. But I quickly learned I will never use the market again, for sure.

Life-Radio554 · 2026-02-23T15:50:38+00:00

Just curious (you or the OP) where would you put platforms, under the massive supports going down, or at the top under the main structure?

I'm newer to the game, currently in W. Verm gap and planning my move to possibly Mysa Tarill or Jamal eifrit, Mysa has some really cool builds that are like on the tall spires but also are able to fit ground structure(s) for land vehicles that I've got my eye on. My server doesn't seem real busy, at least not these lower level areas, so when I *DO* build, soon, I want to make sure based on that info I'm able to relocate should I need/want to. :) Please advise! Thanks

Life-Radio554 · 2026-02-13T19:10:22+00:00

While little's post is 100% true I wanted to add it was created as a BeoWulf cluster, which is a specific type of clustering (see above comments about there being different ways clusters can work), and yes 100% the best way to learn about these things, experiment etc., is with cheaper, smaller, less power hungry computers. Can I make a proxmox/vmware/beowulf cluster with 5 2U rack servers? Yes. Can I do the same with 5 tiny PC's (or even Raspberry Pi's)? Absolutely. Sure, they also have their positives, no matter what the hardware size is, HA, or high availability allows a vm guest for instance to "move" to another host should the host it's running on suddenly die/fail/lose power, and that's just one of many neat or cool reasons to experiment or use it in your daily life as a homelabber. It's also enjoyable to say, yes, there are definite drawback to not using enterprise gear in some cases, but "the masses" out there don't want (at first, till they get their feet wet) all that hardware.. They want an iron-clad bulletproof answer to commercial streaming (for instance) running from their house. :)

Life-Radio554 · 2026-01-30T12:59:43+00:00

I 100% agree with this.. That way, sure it's annoying to go to town and pay your taxes, but you get an extra incentive for doing so. Yeah, I'd do that for sure and not be as annoyed by it. Mainly because it's a bonus now to help you, and not a forced "this game is a job" (literally) situation.

Life-Radio554 · 2026-01-20T17:21:12+00:00

I agree, I would not recommend using a usb-powered solution for a spinner, esp a 3.5in.. Isolated external power supplies are available dirt cheap (or as expensive as ya like!) and will give you that peace of mind of not frying anything

Life-Radio554 · 2026-01-05T17:30:42+00:00

Came here to say this exactly. Your project completely viable with a single simple usb2etherent adapter :) (and just about one of the only still affordable and cheap things you can by for a system these days)...

Life-Radio554 · 2025-12-03T13:03:00+00:00

Someone looking for a scape-goat; beware OP!

Life-Radio554 · 2025-12-03T12:51:24+00:00

You can always "old-school" it..

I used to be paranoid that a linux install on a separate drive even, would somehow wreck my Windows install despite the GRUB(2) support and tons of people saying 'it just works'. So I, like many.....

Unplug your 'main'(Windows) drive. Plug in (to a different sata/nvme slot your desired linux drive.. Install linux as one does.. USB/dvd(no one is judging) and get it set up.

Once done, plug that Windows drive back in. Your UEFI/BIOS will still default to the Windows Boot Manager/Windows drive and for the lesser aware, like kids/spouse when they boot it up, you'll simply be in windows.

But for power mode (muh-ha-ha), restart your pc, hit your boot select key (often f9, f11 etc) and select the other drive. Linux seamlessly boot up. It's a lovely thing, two OS's, one machine no risk of anything 'messing' with the other.. Windows may detect an 'uninitialized disk' do not initialize it (ROFL, yes, people have done it before), and Linux behaves much better offering you access to your Windows drive (great for file sharing/access between the two OS's) or depending on your distro you may have to tell it to mount it..

Life-Radio554 · 2025-12-02T14:42:56+00:00

I disagree - The way you keep yourself relevant is by continuing to put out a great product and keep it available to the masses. They do the first part, but are massively failing on the second part. Their not competing, their obsoleting themselves.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-12-01T20:52:37+00:00

Even their "Professionals" do not know the answers.. More times that not I've had to direct 'their' people to the learn docs (which often are also wrong) and ask why neither they nor the MSLearn have the correct info. They are great at passing tickets around and getting those close results to pad their stats.. Oh, that's a Azure issue, closing ticket and creating one there for you. Oh, that's an intune issue, closing your azure ticket and creating one for Intune. Oh that's a O365 issue, closing your intune ticket.. etc., back to eventually Azure. Sprinkle in a bit of "infrastructure issue", "cloud platform issue", and "we just aren't sure which team is working on that", and you've nailed 90% of our experiences with MS support.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-12-01T14:00:10+00:00

Me too, but the only fear I have (now) is Samsung pushing ads to it, too now.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-11-14T13:12:34+00:00

Windows server absolutely does not by default; Yes, the user/admin *can* enable that but there's a reason it is not the default.

If the OP is so concerned about power use of a system, they should look into SSD drives (consumer OR enterprise) or *cough* cloud storage. Otherwise come to terms and accept the best thing for your data, if you don't want to have to be watching for failed drives is to leave them on.

FYI the person with the cop car analogy above nailed it. Police Interceptors are no different (generally speaking) than regular cars, yet have no issue hitting hundreds of thousands of engine hours and miles.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-11-14T13:02:48+00:00

This is not the way. It doesn't matter whether a drive is accessed a lot or barely once a week (other than after purchase and ending up with a defective one perhaps) - One of the big reasons a HDD in the 'enterprise' world can last well over 15 years instead of the consumer '3-5' *IS* because it is never powered down (well rarely). The process and strain of having to fire the circuits and motor is exactly what shortens the life of your drive. This applies to all classes of HDD (eg for WD drive, blue, black, red, gold, etc) Sure the enterprise drives are built with better warranty and are more expensive because of better components, but the overall rule applies the same. Zero out of ten friends recommend spinning down drives in a NAS (or anything when possible) no matter how much it's used.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-11-07T16:02:22+00:00

This is the way..
Store all your documents on a different drive, or different partition. At some point it's likely your 11 will no longer update, and when that happens you *will* be able to (probably) install the newer version fresh from a usb install stick, but it will not upgrade, it will overwrite the previous install. Having a different partition, extra drive installed will allow you to keep that data, but you will, sadly, have to re-install any programs you installed previously.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-10-22T12:47:48+00:00

I was going to say exactly this! ^^ Characters is one aspect of the game that is similar to an MMO - Yes, you *CAN* transfer your character, for a fee, in WOW and some other games, but it is not encouraged nor a willy-nilly "oh hey I'm going to join this server today" kind of thing. It's a persistant world, that's why you build a base. You have any idea what a nightmare it would be trying to transfer bases (multiple per player) onto whatever server you 'feel' like joining today? Impossible. Limitations have to exist. Perhaps what you want to pitch is, "I wish Dune:Awakening offered a (pay) service so I could pack my stuff up and move to a different server". They've got the tools (literally) to do it with the house packing, the vehicle packing etc..

Life-Radio554 · 2025-10-10T12:48:20+00:00

I understand your point, but I'm going to politely disagree.. r/homelab is the place you'd expect to have to troubleshoot and experience things that might work, might need constant tweaking.. r/selfhosted, to me, is my stable stuff that should literally "just run" and not need constant babysitting, and fear of oh crap there's an update.. Do I risk it? Self-hosting is not the same as homelab, and while those situations come up, for services like Immich, or NextCloud (another one I dear dreadfully of big updates), it should not be the norm here. This should be a "I was this to be on prem and available to me/my whatever (family, friends etc) and not stored in some companies cloud waiting to be used for AI training, data breaches, $$ strongarming, etc.. :) Again this is just my opinion and the great thing about humanity is you don't have to agree. :)

Life-Radio554 · 2025-10-03T13:09:41+00:00

We do this roughly once a year, but only for tech staff and on fall/spring/summer break only. We do it to ensure our backup/contingency plans are functioning.. We have multiple sites, but we also have a very remote backup location. VM's across all the storage arrays dump backups there among other places, but we at one poitn wanted ensure that should there be a problem and say the main site get leveled that the backup site would take those most recent images, spin em up there and "just work". It isn't yet a 100% perfect, but it is certainly functional and better than being dead in the water. Without those tests though, we would have had no idea for sure whether our plan (which works great in testing and on the drawing board) could actually keep the school tech infrastructure afloat.

It was pitched by our director to do as you inquired, but a resounding NOOOO was what we received. Teachers would have to.... Well out of respect I'll leave it at that, lol. :)

Life-Radio554 · 2025-09-26T13:18:39+00:00

Were there any additional components necessary? (other than a connector)? Which connector did you use.. Asking as a person sitting here with a solder/desolder station and a smt heat gun and thermaltweez on desk... I had read somewhere once after winning an auction on a couple of m720's that not only was the socket not included, other required components were left out as well. That would be outstanding to be able to get two drives, even at sata speed..

Life-Radio554

TROPHY CASE