I am currently looking for Thin Clients on ebay to use as my main server instead of the RPi 4 with an external USB drive.
I found decent offers for:
- Dell Optiplex 3020M with i5-4590T 4GB RAM 120GB SSD
- Dell Wyse 5070 with Celeron J4105 or Pentium Silver J5005 both with 8GB RAM 64GB SSD
Given the current prices of new hardware my questions are:
- Should I go for 8GB RAM?
- Or are 4GB RAM fine and I should take double the storage?
Things I want to run on this server:
- Karakeep
- FreshRSS
- Paperless-NGX or Papra
- Immich
- Booklore
Because I plan to mostly use podman I tried to check for virtualization and all three suppoert Intels VT-x technolgy, will that be fine for my use case?
I would go for the Wyse 5070 as a server. More RAM is good and the CPUs while somewhat slower are more power efficient.
The 4/5th gen Intel CPUs are the last gen that is really quite poor in power efficiency when mostly idling. 6/7gen made huge improvements in that regard.
Upgrading the storage should be possible quite easily.
Yeah power efficency should not be undervalued! But I read that the Wyse 5070 CPUs officially only support 8GB RAM so no big upgrades possible.
At some point the benefit of extra RAM isn’t there anymore compared to what the CPU can actually run. With a CPU like that 8GB is probably sufficient and 16 would be merely nice to have for some additional caching.