Hi all, since ya’ll are self hosters, I’m sure you all deal with all sorts of different pieces of hardware, accessories, peripherals, and what not; just wondering if you could please share your favorite, solid, “go to” brands for overall things you need for your setup such as cables (all types), adapters, dongles, power accessories, hubs & docks, flash drives, you name it! I’m sure it varies depending on exactly what type of equipment you’re looking for but just looking for overall good brands to stick with for such things. I obviously know the main ones like Anker, Cable Matters, Ugreen, maybe Belkin, Idk. Would love to hear your recommendations! Thank you

  • vettnerk
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    1 year ago

    Servers: Supermicro. Dell in a pinch
    Switches: HPE Aruba for 10gig, or Mellanox for 100gig
    Routers: I’m not that picky, but I use Fortigate as I scavenged some leftovers at work
    UPS: Eaton
    Network cards: Intel for 10gig, IBM for 8 or 16gig, Mellanox for 100gig
    Harddrives: Exos
    RAID stuff: LSI MegaRaid.
    GPU: Don’t really care, but I have a bunch of NVidia Quadro.

    Most of the above preferences are due to scavenging leftover hardware at work.

    • Macaroni9538OP
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      1 year ago

      Wow wow wow, you guys are light years ahead of me in the equipment department. I plan to learn and utilize a lot of that stuff but I was more interested in the smaller everyday things like chargers, cables, flash drives, adapters, etc lol still great info though. I was super intruided by supermicros server selection when I went down that rabbit hole. Truth is, I’m not nearly ready for a server yet.

      • vettnerk
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        1 year ago

        Depends on which aspect of you needs to be ready. Use case and functionality? Meh, now is as good time as any. Might as well get used to the differences from a desktop to servers early on. Especially if you still don’t really have the knowledge. Learn by doing!

        Budget? True, they can be pricey, even on the after market. But if you or a friend works anywhere that had servers, chances are that the IT department might have something that’d otherwise end up in the trash. A good example here is this VM server with rather old CPUs and 256G of RAM. It wasn’t fit for its pyrpose anymore, and its hardware configuration made it a bad match for our storage clusters. Today it’s a minecraft server for my kids and their friends.

        EDIT: Actually, the older PowerEdge servers feom Dell aren’t that pricey on my local marketplace.

        • Macaroni9538OP
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          1 year ago

          Thanks! I certainly do plan to venture into servers, but its a tad too confusing ATM as I’m currently trying to learn other things and projects right now. Homelabbing is definitely a future plan and goal of mine :)

      • vettnerk
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        1 year ago

        Nah, I work for a geophysical company with a bunch of storage clusters and data crunchers around the world.