Summary
- Farm name: “feorm”
- Nodes: 1
- First node online: July 9th, 2020
- Node hardware: HPE EC200a with aftermarket memory/drives
- Farm resources: 8 CRU, 63 MRU, 7452 HRU, 1907 SRU
- Network: 25 mb/s cable internet link, standard consumer modem/router combo, default settings
Details
Here’s my little home farm, with the first node hanging out by my modem/router:
The server is an HPE Proliant EC200a. I chose it for its small form factor, low power consumption, and excellent value. It boots via EFI from a USB stick (provided USB image did not work), and runs Zero OS v2 without issue.
My guess is that this model (and its hard to find add on storage unit) wasn’t a very successful product, given that the current HPE Gen10 lineup favors the microserver design fitting 4 LFF drives as the smallest option. Mine came from a vendor who was liquidating unsold stock. So these are brand new, though slightly outdated (within four years old), machines that were stripped of the original memory and drives to be sold separately. In my opinion, they are great candidates for running DIY nodes at home, so I bought two Here’s the other one (backup for now, maybe outfitted later), showing my little terminal station for setting up boot configuration:
They came even smaller than I expected, as you can see next to the monitor. Specs are:
- Intel Xeon D-1518 SOC with 4 physical cores @ 2.2Ghz
- Two DIMM slots, up to 64gb memory
- Two LFF drive bays
- One M.2 SSD slot
- Two NICs and one dedicated NIC for ILO
- 120w external power supply
Here’s what an empty one looks like on the inside, and the M.2 spot on the bottom:
The node I have online is fitted with 2x32gb memory sticks, two 4tb HDDs, and a 2tb M.2 drive:
Total hardware cost for this node (all new, enterprise grade components): USD $686
Monthly energy cost: USD $8
Expected ROI: we’ll see, but I’m guessing pretty darn good
Downsides to the EC200a as a node are that it cannot be certified and the fan is a little loud to be running in the living room all the time. I’ll be moving my router and node into a closet to help with noise (wish I had a basement, where it would also be cooler). My router is a standard consumer cable modem with a wifi router built in (Arris SURFBoard SBG10), connected to a 25mb/s Comcast cable internet connection here in Eugene, Oregon. Just default settings on the router, which thankfully includes IPv6:
And apparently some DoS protection too:
Future plans in consideration include adding more nodes, upgrading my internet package (more bandwidth and unlimited data will probably be necessary, especially if any more storage capacity is added and actually used), and utilizing the dual NICs on these boxes to expose them directly to the internet via the router’s DMZ (maybe no benefit for me, but sounds like fun).
I am really excited to be helping to grow the ThreeFold Grid as a farmer. It’s been a dream of mine for a while now to have a little box sitting in the corner generating cryptocurrency, but mining rigs have never appealed to me. Getting my node running was surprisingly easy, and I love that it’s part of a movement for evolving both the internet and humanity.