1 yr. ago • 50%

Anyone have experience w/ Lenovo Thinkstation P320 and Thinkserver TS150 (or similar)?

I'm currently running a P320 as my home server with a 1230 V6 CPU, but have been looking at upgrading to a 1245 V6 for transcoding with Intel QSV. Now I have the opportunity to buy a TS150 with a 1245 V6 for only a bit more than the CPU alone.

I was going to jump on this right away because I figured the ThinkSERVER must be better than my ThinkSTATION, but comparing specs they seem extremely similar to me.

Same chipset, similar size, similar PSU, both I think I could get 5 drives in, and both have AMT. Curious if I'm missing something here. Does anyone have any thoughts on if this would be an upgrade (other than the CPU of course) or are these 2 platforms really this similar?

For reference, I'm running Truenas Scale as a file server plus a handful of apps.

8 comments

I've had experience with the R620 or whatever it's called

The biggest pile of shit I've ever used. Sometimes if it shuts down there's a BIOS bug where you have to take out the CMOS battery for a few minutes for it to boot again. Otherwise it'll just boot to a black screen

The I/O on it is horrendous too

Stay so fucking far away. Stick with Dell or HP

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We’ve been using an SR670 for a while now as one of our main VSphere / ESXI hosts. Lenovo always offers free bios updates and patches which you can do easily with Lenovo BOMC. HP lock their critical updates/bios/firmware down behind support contracts - I’d say Lenovo are a good option for homelab users or those who don’t have budgets to pay for said contacts.

As far as your question, why would you upgrade to something that has the same specs, yet is in a different form factor? At most you’d get some negligible benefits such as Lenovo’s equivalent to HP ILO if that is not already included in the Thinkstation. I’d upgrade the specs with a better Lenovo server if you can afford to.

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- Yeah that's what I was confused about. It's also essentially the same form factor. I guess I assumed there would be more differences between the 2 models. I'm not very experienced with the server management tools and whatnot so didn't know if there was any benefit there.
  
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You might have better luck posting in hardware related subs. Maybe homelab?

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Maybe it's common knowledge but anyway, thinkserver can't be turned to sleep.

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The HP Z600 is good value for money. Units a few years old can be bought cheaply. They're quiet for the compute power on offer. There are hundreds of different configurations available all the time on eBay.

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- Thanks when I expand my setup down the road I'll have to check it out
  
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I got 5 ThinkStation P320 Tiny units last week (Lenovo ThinkStation P320 Tiny i7-7700T 16 GB 256 GB NVMe Quadro P600).

On 3 (2 others are for a different project) I have increased the RAM to 32gb (later 64gb) and added 2 2tb NVMe. I've also added ASUS 2.5gbit USB adapters (used for Ceph).

My plan is to use the 3 for a k3s cluster that will run 2 copies of plex (1 tv and 1 movies), *arr, and a bunch of other apps.

Currently I have spent the weekend trying to get Ubuntu 22.04 Server installed and the Quadro P600 recognized and patched (removing the streaming limits). I have also worked on Ceph this weekend, I am trying to get it running installed on the OS, not containerized. I intend to use the 2.5gbit network to replicate my k3s pod data. I am setting the Ceph pool to about 1.9tb, leaving only 100gb for the OS and local installs.

So far Ceph has proven difficult for me as the only method I can find for a newer version (Quincy or Reef) is cepadmin which uses containers. So I am trying to use old instructions for Ceph to get the newer version working. This will be an evening/next weekend project.

Couple things I have learned:

The built in hardware RAID does not work, Ubuntu will not recognize it so don't bother. Just built is as software RAID if you need it.

After the steps to get the Quadro P600 installed, Gnome is installed. I tried for 6 hours to get around this. I just wound up setting GRUB to a non GUI boot

F1 for BIOS & F12 for boot menu

Yet to be done:

TailScale with TailScale Funnel

MetalLB for load balancing all traffic or of k3s

Rancher Configuration

Helm

Container config

rClone config to Google Drive (only for encrypted offsite backups of configs and secrets)

SMB/NFS connection to NAS for media library

Lost of self induced headaches, but this project is also helping me learn k3s, Ceph and Helm.
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