ServeTheHome has been doing a ProjectMiniMicro on testing out different second hand ~1L sized mini-pcs. The series starts with a fairly unimpressive old Dell unit & some background. Matches a lot of what I've been doing at home.
I do like the idea of getting a free battery back-up &built-in crash cart for my server. On the other hand, a lot of these mini-pc's have much more powerful cores & more expandability, typically both an m.2 nvme slot and a 2.5" sata, two so-dimms, and a lot more video & usb out.
I ran a thinkpad T61 as a server for a bit. It’s a decent solution and yes it has a built in UPS :)
Really these big clusters rarely need to be run 24/7 so it’s more economical to run one node doing stuff that has to be on all the time. Everything else I run in virtualbox on my desktop which is a fairly hefty Ryzen which gets turned off when I don’t need it.
I will replace my Lenovo M series with a VPS node when someone does one that Devuan works on.
https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...
I do like the idea of getting a free battery back-up &built-in crash cart for my server. On the other hand, a lot of these mini-pc's have much more powerful cores & more expandability, typically both an m.2 nvme slot and a 2.5" sata, two so-dimms, and a lot more video & usb out.