I am currently looking for Thin Clients on ebay to use as my main server instead of the RPi 4 with an external USB drive.

I found decent offers for:

  • Dell Optiplex 3020M with i5-4590T 4GB RAM 120GB SSD
  • Dell Wyse 5070 with Celeron J4105 or Pentium Silver J5005 both with 8GB RAM 64GB SSD

Given the current prices of new hardware my questions are:

  • Should I go for 8GB RAM?
  • Or are 4GB RAM fine and I should take double the storage?

Things I want to run on this server:

  • Karakeep
  • FreshRSS
  • Paperless-NGX or Papra
  • Immich
  • Booklore

Because I plan to mostly use podman I tried to check for virtualization and all three suppoert Intels VT-x technolgy, will that be fine for my use case?

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    At some point the benefit of extra RAM isn’t there anymore compared to what the CPU can actually run. With a CPU like that 8GB is probably sufficient and 16 would be merely nice to have for some additional caching.

    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      11 hours ago

      I think it depends. when you run many things for yourself and most services are idle most of the time, you need more RAM and cpu performance is not that important. a slower CPU might make the services work slower, but RAM is a boundary to what you can run. 8 GB is indeed a comfortable amount when you don’t need to run even a desktop environment and a browser on it besides the services, but with things like Jellyfin and maybe even Immich, that hoard memory for cache, it’s not that comfortable anymore.