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When to retire a home server?

Posted on 6/6/25 at 6:46 pm
Posted by Dallaswho
Texas
Member since Dec 2023
2706 posts
Posted on 6/6/25 at 6:46 pm
I know the corporate rule was four and now six years, but what about your janky home equipment?
I’ve had an old Dell workstation with dual broadwell for years now but this year it went down for mobo and ram. Total cost was $50 but there was downtime, moving VMs and what not. I also had to upgrade the power supply for more GPUs.
When do you guys give up on an old machine and where is the sweet spot for buying the next homelab? I think pcie 4.0 and at least 6 channel mem will be my consideration for the eventual replacement. Any recs? Should I hold out a couple more years until I actually need more compute?
Posted by bluebarracuda
Member since Oct 2011
18892 posts
Posted on 6/6/25 at 8:39 pm to
Run it until it breaks or I get the itch to upgrade
Posted by Dallaswho
Texas
Member since Dec 2023
2706 posts
Posted on 6/6/25 at 8:55 pm to
quote:

Run it until it breaks

Ya but how many times? Fixing a Broadwell machine is basically free now and it’s still super capable. You can buy an E5-2650v4 for $5 now and it can run anything.
The Lenovo P620 looks tempting at $700. Doesn’t give me any more CPU or any less heat but gives a ton more throughput. I’m stuck with workstations space wise.
This post was edited on 6/6/25 at 9:24 pm
Posted by bluebarracuda
Member since Oct 2011
18892 posts
Posted on 6/6/25 at 9:29 pm to
quote:

Ya but how many times?


Whatever your budget can handle. This is a hobby after all
Posted by mchias1
Member since Dec 2009
913 posts
Posted on 6/7/25 at 5:42 am to
For home, I just buy used office equipment. If something dies it gets replaced with something newer. That stuff is always on sale at eBay and the like. Zero reason to try to repair, except for maybe if it s a drive that fails.
Posted by TAMU-93
Sachse, TX
Member since Oct 2012
1085 posts
Posted on 6/7/25 at 10:14 am to
My home server is a corporate hand me down. I'll retire it when something newer comes my way.

That Lenovo P620 is a lot of horsepower for $700. It would be overkill for my needs. If I had to buy something, I'd get a $150 Dell OptiPlex refurb off eBay and put a big spinning disk in it.
Posted by notsince98
KC, MO
Member since Oct 2012
20167 posts
Posted on 6/7/25 at 11:49 am to
About 18 years for me but still no desire to upgrade. I love keeping old machines purposeful.

I just rebuilt a machine last week with a q9650 and 32GB of RAM and put Lubuntu on it. Runs fantastic and can host everything I need including Minecraft servers.
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