ThinkPad as a server: the follow-up

submited by
Style Pass
2023-01-27 06:00:08

It’s been a while since I last wrote about my ThinkPad T430 that was tasked with being a home server. After doing some experiments with my setup a couple of times, it is once again the main server for all my self-hosting needs. However, this time I have made some adjustments.

The monstrosity that you’re looking at is what I’d call “the minimum viable ThinkPad as a server”. To be fair, you could go even more minimal by ripping out everything but the motherboard and the drives, but for my use case this is how far I was willing to go.

In my previous post about this setup, I mentioned that the T430 suffered unexpected shutdowns under certain situations, which usually involved running the fan at the lowest speed, moderate to high CPU load, and a lot of storage activity. It wasn’t the CPU as the temperatures were way below the critical point, so I suspected either the motherboard or the storage running hot and tripping some sensor that I wasn’t aware of.

For a while now, I have been thinking about running the T430 as bare as possible. One idea involved taking the bare motherboard and the storage and slapping it on an acrylic sheet with some stand-offs, which should give it the best chance at cooling. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to commit to this, and that setup would have had some downsides as well. At some point an idea popped to my mind: I could probably achieve a similar result by stripping everything but the bare necessities from the laptop and improve the cooling as a result. That’s how I ended up with what you just saw.

Leave a Comment