Hey all, lurker for a bit, but just joined because I’ve started my journey of self hosting the simple stuff (or at least I hope it’s simple). For the past couple years I’ve been using a RPi Zero W for PiHole, and more recently go into Jellyfin and Home Assistant, using an RPi4 and an RPi3+ respectively. I’ve also got a hand-me-down Synology ds214j NAS with 2x8TB in RAID0 RAID1, which is about half full atm. I’m not expecting to expand that storage anytime soon, so I’ve pivoted to an attempt at combining the 3 Pis above into one NUC/SFF/etc device with a roughly similar power draw. Also looking at re-jumping back into 3D printing using OctoPrint.
I’ve looked briefly at jumping to a Pi5, but that led me down the rabbit hole with Jeff Geerling’s article/video on Pi vs. NUC. I’ve continued to putter around looking at NUCs in the ~$200 range. Hoping to stick with MinisForum, GMKTek, or Beelink if possible, but only because… it’s all I know. I’d like to also tinker deeper with Linux flavors, as I’m a noob at best with it but want to at least have some growing knowledge, as I’ve primarily been a Windows gamer and use Apple at the office almost exclusively. I’d like to try staying with AMD as I’ve slowly moved over from the “dark side” (don’t hurt me) that is Intel and Nvidia.
Last nugget is that I’ve never tinkered with Docker, as it seems that may be the best route to host all these apps on one contiguous installation. I’ve new-ish to VMs too, so anything “Baby’s First VM” would be nice.
I know I made a giant pile of wants/needs, so if there’s no magical unicorn, I’m cool with other ideas. Thanks in advance, and I’m really keen on seeing what options I have.
I use RPi 4 2Gb for Pi-Hole.
Just retired a broken 8th gen intel i3 laptop used for Jellyfin. Its replacement is a GMKTec G3 N100. 4 core 4 thread, single channel SDRAM, but 12th gen Intel which is capable of a wider range of encoding & transcoding. Came with 8Gb ram and 256GB Nvme. Cost Less than £100 on ebay. Jellyfin installed ontop of Debian & very pleased with it.
Currently running Truenas scale with smb shares to service local network.
Additionally VPN on router provides access to home network.
I have a few redundant Rpi’s sitting about now as I’ve consolidated and will be using more NUC/ MiniPC hardware in future. They’re just better value at the moment for me.
Not looked at HA seriously yet, but its part of the plan
This is going well for me - Jellyfin etc
I was hosting most of my Docker stuff on my Synology DS920+, use Docker in a Pi 4B for AdGuard Home and WireGuard, and found myself wanting to use Home Assistant.
Can’t use Docker for HA if you want HACS (addons) and Synology decided to kill USB drivers some time back, so looked around for options. Considered a Nabu Casa Yellow with a CM5 compute module (for Voice PE) and its price was more than a GMKtek N150 NUC, which has far higher specs and enough headroom for other things. So I got the NUC.
First thing I did was nuke Windows and replaced it with Proxmox, then installed Home Assistant OS (HAOS) as a VM in it. Plenty of headroom left, so now it’s also got a Linux VM, a few LXCs, etc. (The Proxmox Helper Scripts site makes it very easy).
Could easily install AGH or PiHole and a bunch of other things on it. Think it’s the best bang for buck thing I’ve bought in years.
I have a NUC with an intel N6005 in it for around that price, very happy with it.
Dell refurbished 1L PC?
I am more of a Lenovo guy, but they are more or less the same anyway.
Here is a great list of these tiny PCs: https://github.com/a-little-wifi/TinySecrets
Best bang for your buck in general, IMO, is going to be an off-lease mini or SFF from eBay.
There are some Lenovo minis with Quadro GPUs in them as well. Would be handy for transcodes, if that’s something you require for Jellyfin.
Any Intel CPU with quicksync will likely be plenty transcoding capability for his use case with significantly lower power draw
Can confirm, this is my setup and it works great.
I’ve found that you don’t need to go that far above the $200 cost of an Intel N100/150 system to get a mini PC with a significantly more powerful AMD processor. It won’t be the latest generation but it will be capable of a lot more than those low-power Intels, and from my measurements many AMD processors of the last three generations or so are good at saving power when they’re idle, so it won’t use a ton more electricity. Sometimes you find used ones on eBay at a decent price because someone upgraded.
But is it necessary? I’d rather focus more on the tdp.
I know I could just boost the tdp of the n150 if I did want more power, but I see people here running stuff on 10 year old laptops and older Intel n series stuff seemingly without a problem.
Wouldn’t that laptop use so much more power that it costs you more in electricity though? At least that is usually the problem I hear with it, not sure what a good low spec option is currently once electricity prices are included. IIRC N150 is pretty good, not sure if there are other good/better options though.
Would the 5000 series of AMD’s Ryzen 5/7 be a good bet to baseline with? Couple gens old now, so I’m thinking kinda cheap. Something like this from Beelink perhaps?
The Ryzen 5000 series should be a good choice for such an application, they’re still quite powerful CPUs. You should just make sure that you get the notebook/APU variant of the CPUs (e.g. 5600G or 5600U) and not the desktop variant (e.g. 5600 or 5600X). The desktop variant has significantly higher idle power consumption (see e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/comments/1l707yc/nas_idle_power_usage/, they report 50+W in idle, while my 8500G system idles at 17W). The one you linked should be fine.
Yes, I think that’s reasonable. The midrange CPU in the Beelink you linked is already significantly more capable than the Intel N150 etc., though it has a TDP of 15W compared to the N150’s 6W. I haven’t dug into which specialized features they support (hardware codec support etc.) but for a general-purpose computer I’d definitely prefer the one you linked to those N100/N150 minis, even if it uses a little more power. Others might have a different opinion but that would be my choice.
I generally agree, but keep in mind that CPU TDP is not a good metric to predict the total power consumption of a home server. Most of the time, the CPU is in a very low power state and the power consumption is dominated by things like the mainboard, drives, PSU, … Wolfgang has a good video on the topic: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=239
That said, the conclusion that the 5600U system draws more power than a N150 one is probably still correct in most cases.
I think the N100 units are still the best value.
While N100 is great for what it is, especially at a $200 budget, it can be limiting with its fairly small core/thread count if you expand beyond a handful of applications.
OP mentioned tinkering with multiple Linux flavors. A higher end cpu, with more cores and threads, would allow them to virtualize multiple instances on top of whatever other workloads they have and potentially not break a sweat while the N100 could struggle. While such an upgrade would be more expensive, price for performance will likely be significantly better if you can make use of it.
So I was spitballing there with the Linux stuff. Really I just wanna get something I can VNC into and be headless with a webUI. Something in the PopOS / Mint area if possible, but any other more specialized options could be nice. What would be a “next step up” from the n100 if you know? I’m seeing stuff in the 12th Gen arena as just that.
Any particular models I should look out for? I’m kinda thinking from the perspective of the mythic i5 2500k, that is. Curious if what you’ve personally used is something I should consider.
Ensure the CPU has hardware transcoding for the encoding you need. I wouldn’t go with older than intel 9th gen.
Please checkout this wiki guide here
I’ve had good experience with the Minisforum MS-01, while it’s more than your $200 mentioned, it’s been worth every penny. Plenty of power for most homelabs and lots of nice features for future proofing (10gb, Ethernet, plenty of storage options, small but still usable pcie expansion slot) in a small form factor.
I’ve pretty much retired all my RPis at this point and my old Synology NAS is now just storage only with the MS-01 doing all the actual work.
Really don’t have a reason to migrate away from it for many years unless it died. Even then, you can create a promox cluster with them trivially to provide some redundancy.
They also have the a1 and a2 options for AMD but the a1 doesn’t have the same feature set and a2 is pretty expensive if you don’t need the extra power.
I’m finding some $200-ish options on ebay, but not sure offhand how they compare to the MS-01, as that’s definitely more than I’d like to spend. I am inching closer to $300, but that’ll just continue to fuel my indecisiveness :P
While I get leaning towards AMD products, I’ve been doing so as well, when I built my first server with a Ryzen 5 2400GE I have found that there just isn’t as much resources/support for enabling transcoding with the vega 11 in Jellyfin or Immich. Most Intel iGPU’s have a hardware chip specifically tuned for transcoding called quicksync that you should strongly consider.
Especially in the $100-200 price range tiny mini micro’s from HP/Lenovo/Dell are widely available and offer lots of capability in a power-efficient (~10-15w idle, 40-50w full load) and easily maintainable form factor. The Lenovo’s in particular are interesting due to a few models having full pci-e slots if you decide later you want a GPU.
Lenovo pci-eFinally for software I would suggest looking into Cosmos Cloud, I use it and have found it made it so much easier to setup and manage all my docker containers and domain name/reverse proxy settings.
Yeah, I think I’m willing to go Intel if there’s that much a performance gap. I’ll look into the Lenovo option, although I’m not sure I’m the best use case for it. Still, thank you for the suggestions! Any particular models, or is it really down to newer = better? Besides the basic moar RAM, moar CPU, but actually I’m quite ootl with the naming conventions with non-desktops procs.
In terms of the tinyminimicro’s I think i5-6500T 7500T or 8500T (T signifies 35w TDP) could all fit your price point depending on RAM/SSD specs. I haven’t done much research on the n100 processors but I think they are broadly comparable to the above i5’s
Pi 4 should be plenty to run Jellyfin, homeassistant, pihole and octoprint. Docker setup is pretty straightforward, and I can vouch that HA & pihole containers work great on RPi, if you want to leave the Jellyfin setup as-is and put the others alongside.
If you’re looking for an excuse to expand, my vote is for an N100 type system. I got one with 4 ethernet ports, PCIe for a wifi card, couple of NVME slots, and a half dozen SATA ports for $100-150. That’s a huge step up in potential without much increase in power draw. With the right wifi card, you can even use it to replace your WAP/router.
Maybe I will try to redo the Pi4. Just wanna see if I can make a full backup of Jellyfin’s config beforehand. Or, y’know, just buy a few extra microSD cards.
But yes, the excuse is valid. I feel like eventually I’ll hit a wall with the Pi4, but I also dunno how much more I’m trying to expand anyway. Basically trying to get to that low power, self-sufficient plateau without going too overboard.
If you have the spare cash, I found the N100 NAS motherboard to be a great source of occasional weekend projects, and now it very definitely looks like I’ve gone overboard.
I started out just wanting a file server to store backups.then…
- DHCP and NAT because my ISP would only allow one user.
- DNS so I could refer to systems by name
- pihole
- mythtv/tvheadend so I could watch OTA tv & archive CDs & DVDs
- hostapd for Wifi
- homeassistant
- immich
- nextcloud
- tandoor recipes
- just added fastenhealth for medical records
It didn’t feel like a lot, because it took years. Among the amazing things has been all the times I’ve been able to upgrade the motherboard by just plugging the HD into the new board. Started out just using old desktop boards; the N100 was the first purpose-bought board, and also the most complicated upgrade, because it added UEFI. There definitely are projects out there that don’t have an arm option, so something x86 is more flexible.
I got an old Lenovo P330 Xeon with 64 G of ECC ram. I recently checked its power usage for another poster asking the same thing. I was shocked to see it only use 15Watts while streaming 4k hevc.
For server use, ECC is important because it’s going to be on 24/7 for years at a time.
Oh wow. Yeah, I have an old server hand-me-down from a friend, and his first red flag with it was it was gonna pull down $50 more power monthly 0_o. I may look into this. I have a few old cases lying about, but I was looking from in the super small form factor as I could nestle it in my network cabinet.
Perhaps not the size you’re after, but I have a HP Z1 G5, i9-9900, 5 SSD, 3 HDD, and that can idle as low as 45W and costs me £60/yr in electric. I managed to pick it up off eBay for only £260 (discounted from £350; if you keep an eye on certain things, sellers drop prices to rid of their gear).
HAOS has add-ons to run a sort of managed version I think of pihole. Good start for containers.
RAID0 is not RAID, because R stands for redundant and RAID0 has dependency on as many drives are in the machine. You need to change that. One drive fails you lose everything.
The question is pertinent to my interests and the answer is to spend some time learning about the benefits and disadvantages of chipsets and processors unfortunately.
Ah crap, I was wrong on that. I have it in RAID1. My bad, I’ve corrected my OG post.
I started with a 2 bay Synology NAS (still have this as storage only and no computing) and added a 12the gen i5 mini PC I got on eBay for £230. That’s worked out great and I would highly recommend it. If you’re on a budget then look for some older hardware.
Docker is also not that difficult to get started with and worth messing around with to learn. I started on with Docker on my Synology and out grew that quickly and have been really happy with my mini PC.
So I couldn’t use Docker on my Synology as it wasn’t compatible, but I did try to try to use Docker, but it was most definitely a test install trying to squeeze Jellyfin and HA onto an 8GB card… yeah that didn’t work (I didn’t try too hard). I’ve heard of Docker Desktop, but sounds like it was not well received.
I’ve heard of Docker Desktop, but sounds like it was not well received.
Don’t know what this means. Docker is universally loved and works perfectly on desktop OSs.
I’m running Debian on my server mini PC. Docker will work on any installation of Windows, Linux, etc and work perfectly well. I played around with it initially by setting up a virtual machine with Debian on my gaming computer and seeing if I could get Docker apps working.
Fast forward to now, and I’m kinda sad that my server is all set up and stable and I have nothing to tinker with.
