I have too many computers, way too many. And there is only one in the stack that I ever bought new (a thinkpad x121e, the ones that lenovo sold at a very discounted price because they knew it had a faulty hinge), on top of my tower PC, obviously.

I have run most of my services for the past few years from a very nice and powerful lenovo thinkcentre M710T (i7-6700, 16GB ram) that was my workstation in its previous life, and that I had the option to buy from my employer at a steeply discounted rate after the end of its warranty.

It has the downside of taking a bit of space, even though its form factor is quite compact already, and consuming a lot of power for the delivered services - it is mostly idle except when some "AI" leeches start scraping my gitea instance -.

I don’t need all this raw power even if it has to manage a few dozen containers, as well as an XMPP server and a few things, and the server is going to be moving soon, to a place where the M710T does not fit, which put me on a quest for a low-profile self-hosting platform (and emitting less heat is always good in this rapidly heating world full of heatwaves).

I had a few criteria in mind:

• Small (e.g. sized like some ARM SoCs) is a real plus
• Must not appear to be a mess of cables and stuff when setup
• MUST have SATA ports, bonus for NVMe
• Ideally x86: I have nothing against ARM boards, but mainline support is often a pain, and also I don't want to rebuild all my containers (if they can even be) for another platform.
• Low consumption

I quickly settled on the Odroid H4 (-PLUS for me) from hardkernel. As it allows me to swap the RAM (so the board is not a brick if the RAM fails), it has one NVMe port (which can be expanded to add more though you get less PCIe lanes, obviously), two 2.5 GbE ports, and the possibility to use an addon to add 4 more ports, 4 SATA ports, In-band ECC support, and most importantly, they provide cases to cater to the various needs of their users.

In my situation, their case with a fan and enough slots for three 2.5" SSDs was exactly what I needed, so I went with that.

The first thing I want to mention is that in europe it is much better to go through odroid.nl (which is really odroid.co.uk with a mustache and a trenchcoat), as the customs and handling fees on the directly imported boards are quite prohibitive, to the point that you pay more to receive your package later and with a worse warranty.

The second point that I want to mention is that you want to do the BIOS upgrade in order to unlock all features (including in-band ecc).

The third point that tripped me up is that "BIOS boot" is not supported at all. I know I should have switched years ago, but “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. As my other computers are also not booted up in UEFI mode, that was fun to debug and recover from, losing me one hour and a half for what should have been a simple disk transplant.

Now everything is up and running very quietly and I shall enjoy a lower power bill during the next years.

Next step: replacing my home-built frankenNAS with an odroid HC4-P.