Rethinking Home Computing.. Part 3

Will this HAM give up with the IT stuff already?

I made the decision late last night to push on with a NUC PC - one with at least a Core i5 and 8GB RAM.  The Kogan Atlas E300 is trying its damnedest to keep up with me, but it's struggling. 

Even with 20 odd browser windows open and my email, the poor Celeron CPU is being flogged. The RAM at least has some margin left after I offloaded another 30 odd browser windows over to a VM. Still, it's flaky, and something like a Facebook message being received can cause it to hiccup. 

For most people, they'd never use quite so many tabs. I do.  I tend to have a lot of things I'm going back to or monitoring frequently. Bookmarks are for less frequently used things. Tabs are there because I need access. When I do research (which is usually a permanent behaviour), I tend to spawn a lot of them quickly. Modern browsers... and the graphics heavy content on websites tend to suck a lot of resources (though how a web page with 5MB of content spawns a tab that sucks 250MB RAM is beyond me). 

I awoke this morning to my email application not responding. Even idling right now, I'm nearly maxed out in RAM, and the CPU cores are all over 50%. Again, this is me cutting back my usual state of operation with a lot of deferred load. It won't be this pretty if I go over to the Facebook tab (80%+ on all cores). 

The E300 did accept a SATA SSD, which I used - it kept the inbuilt eMMC card intact with Windows 10. This was useful. I can push this box over to Windows 10 with no effort beyond dealing with the setup nag screens. The only additional thing short term is a USB sound card for the G90. I can't extend myself to a digimode-4 cable for that G90 as yet, so a $20 adaptor will need to suffice. This box should handle the needs of my radio gear OK. It won't have a lot of RAM left over, but swapping will be less evident. I'll need to keep a second disk in it for additional storage though, as the built in 64GB eMMC won't do the job. With some careful thought about where things are stored and saved, I should be able to make that work. Given how Win10 behaves - this might be a simple case of everything goes to the second disk, and everything else is goes to a networked disk. 

For my PC, I wound up ordering a secondhand Intel NUC7i5BNK. Not particularly cheap still, but it does have a Core i5 and 8GB RAM. It's biggest limits for me are the single HDMI output and no SATA space. 

The CPU performance is miles ahead, despite only having 2 cores compared the Celeron J3455's 4. The i5 does have hyperthreading, runs at higher clock speeds, bigger caches, supports more RAM and so on and so forth. The clincher is that the TDP for this i5 is 15w, compared to 10w for the Celeron. Together these CPUs burn way less power than one of my previous desktop CPUs. 

I had been looking at some other options - a particular Dell Optiplex and an Acer (despite having sworn off them a long time ago), but their age and graphics chips cast doubt over their capability to handle 4K resolutions. That is an absolute for me - I must have 4K. 

In the end for my tight budget, this NUC won out; it was about the cost of slightly more recent "barebone" NUCs sans RAM/SSD. Still more than I wanted to pay, but it should do the job. The only "major" concession I can see so far is the need to buy a USB-C to HDMI cable for a second video output - the USB-C port also acts as a Thunderbird and DisplayPort, so hopefully this should behave OK with Linux. 

Benchmarks between the two make the Intel NUC favourable. The i5 is a newer CPU. User reviews suggest the entire NUC itself at idle <20w, with peaks under benchmarking load up around 50w. Not bad considering the entire TDP of my Ryzen CPU in the old Desktop is 65w alone and requires rather hungry fans for cooling. Don't even bother comparing the i7 in the Radio PC. 

This is certainly closer to where I want to be with my "always on" computing - low power consumption, low physical foot print and the flexibility I need. My interest in big flashy cases with as many drive bays and LED lit fans are behind me. Adequate resources using the least power and space possible is the go. Besides, I have a rack full of gear on the other side of the wall that still requires a small nuclear plant to power cheaply. The server will need to hang about. In the grand scheme, it's usually averaging around 250w, which isn't bad considering what's in it. The shelves of disks however - I really need to change the strategy with those. 

It may become far more viable to look at an "off the shelf" NAS system and put in some disks, or create a couple of "JBOD" (Just a Bunch Of Disks) arrays and pass them into a low power device via USB3 and have it act as a NAS. I'd probably get better disk performance than I do now - I don't get anywhere near the performance I'd expect using old SAN shelves into a HBA controller.

It would be nice to be honest - having the NAS controller currently running as a VM on the server has challenges given that a number of other virtual machines utilise it. It's also a beast of a VM to start given the 60+ disks it has to manage. 

Getting down to maybe two boxes of 5 disks of a decent size would be a good option. Expensive, but a lot cheaper to run. 

Everything is backed up to tape anyway - I know, I know.. that's archaic.. but for cheap mass storage, it works. Especially when you have a lot of tapes you can use, so I can probably survive having less resilience and redundancy.