EDIT 4: I almost gave up on finding the “holy grail” for my use-case. Right price, right specs, etc., and while it’s not perfect, I think I found a solid balance for all. Despite most of the reviews being for a free product, they were well written enough to goad me to purchase. I ended up with the Morefine M9S N305 Mini PC. I grabbed the variant that was still 16GB DDR5, but skimped out of the m.2 size at 256 vs 512. I don’t think I’ll need 512GB for my application. I also went with an older but more powerful Alder Lake i3 n305 vs the flooded market of Twin Lake n150 procs. I would like to think the extra headroom and core count will prove useful with running 3+ VMs. In the meantime, I’ve been slowly tinkering with a VM of Proxmox (VMception?) so see how i performs. I’ve not gotten far with it yet :P
EDIT 3: And Amazon decided to wait until the last minute to cancel my order as it was OOS. Would’ve been nice if they told me sooner. The unit is now also $60 more than before. GREAT.
EDIT 2: I’ve chosen the Beelink EQ14. It had the best “last-gen” specs, lowest price, and better hardware (BT 5.2 vs Pulcro’s 4.2, as well as Wifi6 vs Wifi5). I also ruled out the Morefine because all of its reviews were paid, not very reassuring imho.
EDIT: Holy shit, was not expecting so much support for my inquiry. Thank you all for the bevy of ideas and solutions. I think I’m still gonna go for the Intel 12th Gen+ NUC style, although some of your setups seriously made me quite jelly. Maybe I’ll get there one of these days. I’ll update this when I finally lock down my purchase :)
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.
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
Yeah, this QuickSync option looks like the best all-rounder for my needs. I don’t transcode atm as I’m simple and usually stick with 720/1080p stuff, maybe I’ll get around to 4k eventually (when a codec makes them the size of 1080p vids lol), but for now, all my devices handle video without any extra fancy.
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I think the N100 units are still the best value.
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.
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
tldr: A used x86 desktop is better than a pi
I’ve never understood why so many people self-host on pis. If it’s at home and not on a sailboat or drone, don’t worry about the power consumption. Worry about having enough power for a smooth operation.
Like imagine your jellyfin skips during videos. Now you have to chase down the bottleneck and when you do, probably can’t upgrade the hardware anyway.
Plus if the project doesnt have an ARM binary or container, you have to create a compilation workflow.
Hospitals and schools upgrade their hardware every five years or so (when windows starts to slow down). The x86 workstations go up for auction for cheap. I buy them direct at govdeals.com (usa) where they usually sell in lots. If you just need one, look on ebay where the units are typically resold. Either way you can find something decent for $50-$100.
So buy an x86. It will live forever and you can use your pi in a weather station or drone or similar project where size and power consumption matter.
In my own setup, I have jellyfin on one $50 workstation and homeassistant/frigate on another. I would not have space (resources) for both on one machine because frigate is doing object detection on six cameras (even with a hardware detector). So the homeassistant computer has that NPU and zigbee dongle and a big hard drive for the recordings. In the Jellyfin machine, I put a 12tb hdd for the media and graphics card that is really good at transcoding (I travel a lot and stream videos from home).
I do have a few old desktops I could work with, but my goal here is to find the golden ratio or whatever of hosting a bunch of small things all in one unit without going overboard, and ultimately shoving it all into the networking cabinet I posted in another comment. Low power, low footprint, etc. But who knows? Maybe one day I’ll jump to something like your setup. Thanks for the input!
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
For me Quicksync converts videos anywhere from 4x to 10x faster than using the GPU.
Buy a 7th gen Intel based tiny/mini/micro PC instead of a Pi or NUC. You get much more bang for your buck. 35W max draw. They are far more capable than people give them credit for. I run 3 of them (4 if you count the Mac mini).
As tempting as that is, I’m not expecting to build up something that hefty. Love the wireminding and all, but I’m hoping to keep this as something I can mount nicely in my teeny tiny network cabinet. The horsepower I’m looking for, alongside the low thermal and power loads, are my goal. Maybe I’ll expand beyond eventually, but who knows?
Thank you for the suggestion though! Also love the R&C refs :) Still need to finish Rift Apart.
As tempting as that is, I’m not expecting to build up something that hefty. Love the wireminding and all, but I’m hoping to keep this as something I can mount nicely in my teeny tiny network cabinet. The horsepower I’m looking for, alongside the low thermal and power loads, are my goal. Maybe I’ll expand beyond eventually, but who knows?
Understood! I’m just showing you that a tiny/mini/micro PC is incredibly beefy for what it is, especially when you stuff it with an i7 and a bunch of RAM.
Thank you for the suggestion though! Also love the R&C refs :) Still need to finish Rift Apart.
I name all my physical machines after R&C characters. HA is “Ace” as in Ace Hardlight, and the Optiplex on the left (running Frigate) is “Skrunch”… As in Qwark’s monkey sidekick 😂
Rift Apart was super fun. The final battle sequence is awesome for grinding if you wanna 100% the game. I’ve got it down to a science haha.
I think you are misunderstanding. The part they are talking about are just the small boxes in the center, labelled “mort” “ratchet” and “home assistant.”. You can get used office PCs like those for around the cost of a rpi, and they are way more powerful, but with a low power draw.
Yeah I did get a little __ Lost __ :P
But for reals, yeah I did. I was taking in the entire picture, but still way more than I’m hoping to utilize. One tiny box for now, but maybe down the line I’ll expand to a rack. Its only me, as my housemates use the Jellyfin setup a bit through our TVs, but the HA stuff, and even the PiHole are more or less all mine.
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.
Holy moly. Yeah that’s an exhaustive list :P
I don’t see myself going that far, but again you didn’t either. The Jellyfin/PiHole/HA/OctoPrint is kinda my current scope, but who knows what other options I’ll look into. Having the overhead would always be nice. Although Immich is tempting now as ditching as much Google stuff is also on the horizon (I can’t even think of getting rid of Gmail just yet, but it is inevitable).
Curious, what’s your typical idle/load power draw? I think I’m comfy with up to 40-50w on load (my Ryzen 7700 is 65w TDP), although the less impact on ever increasing bills would be nice.
I’ve got all my internet infrastructure on one monitor - 50W for the N100, the cable modem, an ooma VOIP device, and UPS. I’d guess the server, with its WAP, 4x GbE ports, 2x spinning disks, and USB TV tuner, is 35-ish of those watts.
I’m using a 2019 Dell SFF OptiPlex.
With the current 8TB data drive, it idles at 18w, but being Intel can convert or transcode very quickly.
With the previous 2TB drive it idled at 12w, little more than a Pi but far more capable.
I run my PiHole on it plus Jellyfin, HandBrake, etc. It also has 4 VMs using VMware for some other stuff as needed (testing mostly).
Hard to beat the bang for buck, or per watt.
How do you have it setup though? I got a hp elitedesk 800 micro and wondering what way to set it up
Can you be more specific?
I first ran Proxmox on it (which ran fine, just overkill for my use-case).
Now it’s Windows server and anything I do on it is done in a VM via VMware Workstation (since it’s free). So the host os doesn’t see much change and any changes that break things can be rolled back via a VM snapshot. Proxmox ZFS would be better for this, but I don’t need it, yet.
You could run any Linux distro on it then use KVM for virtual machines and also docker for things like PiHole and Jellyfin.
There’s a million ways to skin a cat, though I like using VM’s so if I need to move a service I just copy the VM to a new box. Even my docker stuff is in a VM for just this reason.
I was mostly just wondering which OS and how you have your pihole and jellyfin set up.
Oh that sounds epic actually. Just like Wizard said tho, I too am curious on your setup. What VM solution? I’ve been looking lightly into ProxMox, but I know nothing much more than the name so far lol.
I’ve run Proxmox on it, but it was overly complex and overkill for my use case.
Right now the host OS is Windows Server running VMware Workstation. Pihole runs in a VM (DietPi), which auto starts on reboot (as does my general purpose VM running Jellyfin). Fast setup, runs as my DC, VM’s as needed with enough performance (though not as much as I’d like for my virtualization goals).
Next box will be my own build since this one is limited on physical space and I have a couple old cases with plenty of room.
HAOS has add-ons to run a sort of managed version I think of pihole. Speaking of easy.
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 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
Yeah, most units I’m looking at now are of the 16GB/512GB flavor, as while that should be plenty of overhead for the time being, I’m wondering if 32GB is the better way to go to give even more buffer and cache space traded off with a smidge more upfront cost. I hope to eventually repurpose the Pis with something else, or donate them to my school’s tech program (yay DoE crumbling :( ), as I currently have one of my RPi4s running Steam Link for my housemate. Freeing up the other Pi4 and the Pi3B+ for other things would be great.
I use RPi 4 2Gb for Pi-Hole.
Pi-hole will run on far less than that. I run Pi-hole and PiVPN on a Zero W. Uptime is over a year now.
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).
Yeah, definitely beyond my needs. I actually have a hand-me-down server a friend gifted me, and that is well beyond what I need, plus power costs in the $50+/mo realm. Certainly not a bad price for that type of performance. Sure, it would be cool to have a centralized system that can do everything, but outside of my initial thoughts of using this setup for 4-5 low-power things, the cost is too great to consider. Thanks for your input nonetheless!
It depends on how old. My Xeons are e-2224G. They’re 14nm coffee lake. They are rated at 71Watts but as I said only use 15w streaming 4k.
They’re $190 on eBay with 16gb ram and 256 GB SSD.
A 16 GB Pi5 is $130 just for the motherboard. You still need storage, case and power supply.
For business, ECC is definitely required. I really don’t see it needed for home use.
I’ve never run it for home boxes - I’ve had a Windows domain at home since the 90’s using desktop hardware and it’s as stable as any SMB I’ve seen running on enterprise-grade hardware.
I switched to ECC only for my home server over 10 years ago after a silent ram error corrupted some data on my raid drives. I didn’t realize there was a problem until I went to look at an old photo and it was corrupted.
“8 percent of the DIMMs saw correctable error per year”
And this was from 20 years ago when memory density was much less so the chance of an error was lower.
@Blue_Morpho @Onomatopoeia Hm, is that something that snapraid scrub would theoretically catch? I’m thinking probably not, as the corruption would likely happen when initially writing the files, rather than after the files have been sitting around on disk for a while.
I have a NUC with an intel N6005 in it for around that price, very happy with it.
Looks like that’s a bit under-powered compared to the N100, but if it more than suits your needs, great! Again, I’m just happy with all the outpouring of info and ideas. Knowing that most NUCs are quite a bit more powerful than Pis is the best new in itself.
yeah it handles 4k streaming fine, everything else is easier than that so all good to me!
I’m in a similar situation currently hosting Pihole on my Pi’s and Jellyfin on a SFF refurbished PC that’s running some other project. I’ve decided to go with a NUC, most likely beelink, and intend to install Proxmox to then run container VMs for each of the various projects to more easily manage them.
I think this is kinda where I’m heading with how the comments are helping guide me. I started this journey nearly 10 years ago with my first house and it was a measly HP SFF junker I had pulled from… somewhere (I honestly don’t recall how it materialized :P ), and had TrueNAS on it with a dinky 2x1TB non-RAID setup. I’d still like to keep my current 2x8TB Synology RAID1 as a separate entity until I deem the need for more local storage, so if I can fit all the brains into one unit for everything I’m hoping to use, so the Beelink/Minisforum/GMKTek route is my current path. Might I ask which model NUC you have?
I haven’t purchased yet; this is the one I’m currently considering:
Oh wow. Heavier hitter than my initial needs, but I wonder if more overhead would be worthwhile, or if the other NUCs I’m looking at will be “enough” for my current and future needs. I do have some card points to burn, so I could get something up this alley. Thanks for the rec!
EDIT: I’ve chosen the Beelink EQ14. It had the best “last-gen” specs, lowest price, and better hardware (BT 5.2 vs Pulcro’s 4.2, as well as Wifi6 vs Wifi5). I also ruled out the Morefine because all of its reviews were paid, not very reassuring imho.
Alright, not sure how many will circle back, but I’ve narrowed down my choices, as they hit my current thresholds - N150 or equivalent/greater, 16GB RAM, 512GB NVMe, and Dual LAN connection.
1st place - Morefine M9S - This caught my eye, as although because to me it’s a no-name brand, it has a beefiest specs still well within my price range ($270-ish)
2nd place - Pulcro.io TurnKey Two - These guys I just found, and they seem the most… professional? Same specs as the two below.
3rd place - BeeLink EQ14 - Weird that link has it as an N100, clearly shows N150 on the page…
Thoughts?
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.
Yeah the HA Docker ish is the one thing I got concerned about, as I already needed to install HACS to integrate my Govee lights into it. For now, I’m also looking at the HA Voice Preview for voice integration, as I’m sick of having my shitty Google Homes all around unable to handle simple requests (like failing to turn on/off lights).
As much as I want to nuke Windows on my main rig, I try to play a lot of VR (especially heavily modded SkyrimVR), and after getting those games tweaked just right, it’d be quite the hit to me if I had to redo all of that again.
Genuinely interested in ProxMox tho, as if I can run all systems in their individual containers (a la Docker w/o the HACS issue) on one main device with a low power overhead, I’m all ears.
The NUC def seems like the best option, although from an earlier replay of mine, I’m still looking into seeing how far I can take the Pi4. MicroSD cards are still far less pricey than a new system after all.
I still use all 3, though I’m slowly moving CPU intensive containers to the NUC. The Pi is untouched so far, partly because having edge services there will make it easier of I decide to implement a DMZ.
The NUC+Proxmox is a great combination. Bit of a learning curve (eg. as with Docker, you need to pass devices in Proxmox and then to the container; same with CIFS shares), but there are lots of resources out there. I have no regrets going this route, and it had low power consumption.
On Windows thing, I was specifically referring to the server OS as the NUC came with Win11. Do whatever works for your desktop/gaming setup.
Though I also switched that to Linux (EndeavourOS, though there are other game-friendly options) a couple of years ago, and its worked out great. Guild Wars 2 was my most modded Windows game, and I can run all except one of the Windows-based addons I want for it. Setting it all up the first time is a ball ache (as it was with Windows, but that was done over time 🤷♂️). 😊
