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They're usually very inefficient energetically though
Yeah, one of my main priorities for a home server is its energy efficiency (and fan noise). Older laptops rarely fit into that. But newer 'ultrabooks' might be good.
do you think they would be better or worse than a desktop? i’m here trying to decide to use my old laptop or desktop as a headless server
Laptops will typically always use less power than a desktop.
But desktops can be cooled much more silently than laptops.
And performance will almost always be better in a desktop. But might also be overkill for what you want to do.
Personally, my 2 servers are a Raspberry Pi 4 running off a USB SSD, and a Synology DS220+, where I found an 8 GB stick of RAM that it would boot with for a total of 10 G.
This perfectly suits all I want to have at this time, with a combined continuous power draw of around 15W.
Depends how old they are
My X230 idles at 10W
Much less inefficient than old it infrastructure.
Yeah, that's sadly the reason why I do have a pile of old pc/laptop hardware laying around and raspberry pi's for my local server needs..
True, but probably better in terms of net environmental cost though. As there is no need to make new sbc board, casing, etc etc.
Can you please elaborate why?