I use my desktop PC for Jellyfin and torrenting, but I’m looking for something that I can keep on 24/7 that draws less power and run other self-hosted services on Linux. I would like to have at least 2x 14 TB 3.5" hard drives in or attached to it with the possibility of expanding in the future.
From my research, these seem to be some good options:
- Mini PC like this Beelink S12 Pro + USB hard drive enclosure. The price seems reasonable for the specs and low power consumption. Not sure if USB will limit transfer speeds.
- ODROID HC-4 or similar SBCs. I feel like these have much lower performance for not much price savings, and it’s harder to get software running up because of ARM. But it seems like they don’t use too much power.
- Used enterprise PCs/servers. I know they can be found cheap used, but I’m a little lost at comparing the performance and power draw to other options.
- DIY build. I’m interested in getting a Mini-ITX case like this Jonsbo N2 and getting parts for it, but it seems like it will be the most expensive option. It does seem like the most modular and upgradable.
- Classic NAS products like Synology. It seems like these are falling out of favor because they are pretty under powered for the price.
What does selfhosted think about these options, and what would you recommend?
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As I always say, have a look through https://forums.serverbuilds.net They have tons of guides on building whatever you need at whatever price point you can afford. The NAS Killer 5.0 is pretty great and I went with a second box for transcoding. Both low power and pretty cheap.
For the money: Used sff like an optiplex 7050 or similar for $100. Typically <20W, real computer performance, can handle a bunch of ram, pcie accelerators depending on what you get into. Add a multi drive enclosure for more storage when needed.
This is what I did and I love it. I will add that sff is bad for upgrades. I wanted to add a gpu to mine and now I have to buy a larger case to put it in.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) Plex Brand of media server package RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
[Thread #77 for this sub, first seen 24th Aug 2023, 01:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Check out ServeTheHome’s “Project TinyMiniMicro” on Youtube for a great overview of ultra-small form factor (“1 liter”) business PCs.
The big three PC makers each have standardized products in this form factor with (relatively speaking, compared to smaller manufacturers) tons of spare parts available.
This is the correct answer. And I think in September most companies do hardware refresh so keep an eye on ebay
I hate to admit that I love using these micro business computers, but they’re pretty awesome. Stackable, powerful, upgradeable, cheap second hand or refurbished. I’ve considered nucs, but you can find buckets of these for cheaper.
I feel like a loser after reading some of these awesome setups, but i just use an rpi4 4gb. It’s enough for 1-2 ppl casual use as NAS, media server, nextcloud, pihole, and a few other things here and there. I have USB hub with it’s own power supply because if not the hard drives lose power occasionally. All in all it’s like 20W max but usually under 10. Best of all it’s completely silent.
Same. I’m using a 2012 Mac mini running Proxmox attached to an OWC Thunderbay 4. It’s old but does everything I need it to do.
I think your setup is fine. I use a raspberry pi on each TV in my home as a media player (Jellyfin, retroarch, sometimes steam link) then also make them act as a docker cluster on the backend to play around with making some services ‘high availability’ so that the service moves around to whichever TV is not under load. I’m also playing with HDMI-CEC on those Pi’s to let my home assistant (also running on a single board computer, zima board) send commands to the TVs and all HDMI connected devices. I have a Pi running Open Media Vault with two drives that provide redundancy. The only high power device I use is my Linux gaming machine also doubles as my Jellyfin transcoder.
I too enjoy the silence and lack of moving components of this setup.
I set myself a budget of ~€150 and eventually settled on a Lenovo Mini PC with an i5 and 8 GB of ram for €160 including shipping. In retrospective, one of those Beelink mini PC’s would have been a better option, they use significantly less energy and have a better performance/price ratio.
I recommend going with option 1.
Just make sure you get an Intel box. If OP ever wants to use Plex it only plays nicely with Intel and Nvidia hardware transcoding.
Nvidia is bad
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I just got into selfhosting with a used thin client (Dell Wyse 3040), only $30 on eBay. I don’t know what I’m doing at all and it’s still working out great for me so far, so I think that’s a good enough endorsement.
I assume it’s a x86 CPU, being an intel processor? How does it manage to be as energy efficient as an ARM CPU? Or maybe it’s only when it’s idle?
Modern Intel CPUs are actually very efficient. And PI’s are not very efficient, just low-powered ;)
Interesting. I’ve been using ARM cores for low energy for so long that I haven’t bother to look if things were changing. :) How does it perform on the heat dissipation front? Because if it requires a fan, this should be included in the energy consumed.
I think ARM is still more efficient. It’s specifically the PIs (or it’s chips) that’s not that efficient by my understanding. AFAIK Intel also is not as close for power draw under load.
The S740 is actually passively cooled, and it sits in my cupboard together with a pi4 backup server, router and modem ;) The S740 became very popular with German selfhosters (used prices actually went from 40€ to 80€ for just the base model because of high demand :D), so there’s a page with power measurements, it’s in German, but pretty self explanatory for the most parts.
Thanks for the link!
Because Pi’s chip is basically GPU with additional ARM processors, while for server use you need only CPU
Nope, the J4105 (which is not a server CPU, server ones are powerful, not power saving) has an iGPU that’s again way more powerful than the PI’s.
Yes, but it uses less part of space and power compared to Pi. On BCM chips ARM core relatively weak compared to VideoCore there.
I suggest you to look at SBCs:
- RockPro64
- Quartz64
- And many others
I don’t find running them problematic, but this is maybe because I have crossdev on gentoo.
Here’s how to install distro on sdcard for SBC:
- Partition sdcard
- Make devicetree file
- For most SBCs dts files are already made
- Configure and install bootloader(e.g. u-boot)
- Unpack base system to sdcard
- Configure, compile kernel and then copy to boot partition(can be shared with system, bootloader must support FS)
My home server is a RockPro64. I didn’t specifically buy it for that purpose but since I had it lying around I figured I might as well use it.
It has a PCIe Slot which I used for a SATA controller, with two 3,5" HDDs.
They have an official NAS case for it too, not sure I’d recommend it as it’s kind of expensive, doesn’t isolate HDD vibration / noise at all and isn’t very convenient to service (to replace the drives for instance). I’m not aware of a better case option for this board though.
I run debian and OpenMediaVault on it (I didn’t have to mess with the kernel or device tree at all), with the ZFS plugin, and several docker containers (Jellyfin, PiHole, Syncthing, Tailscale).
For my needs it’s working perfectly fine and doesn’t need much power. But:
- It isn’t particularly great at video transcoding
- 4GB of RAM isn’t a ton especially with ZFS, keep that in mind if you wish to run more / heavier services such as Nextcloud
- being ARM based, this board basically limits you to OMV or manually setting up stuff on Linux through the CLI, as TrueNAS, Unraid and Proxmox only support x86. OMV is fine for it’s core functionality and you can get some more advanced features through plugins, but at that point it often gets kind of janky and annoying compared to e. g. TrueNAS. Also, the KVM plugin apparently doesn’t work on ARM.
TL;DR these low power ARM boards are just fine as a cheap option for getting into homelab / Self hosting and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend against them, but sooner or later I want to build a low power x86 based NAS with more RAM, SSD cache and TrueNAS Scale instead.
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I’ve been getting pretty excited about RISC-V devices. They are quite efficient and outstrip similiar SOCs in many ways.
The Lichee Pi4A has better benchmarks than a Raspberry Pi 4 at a TDP of 4W and includes a NPU. They are coming out with a cluster board as well.
Cristopher Barnatt does a review of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1apoFXZ9ad8
Since Debian has added RISC-V as a supported architecture, we should start seeing most major software like Docker and KVM being packaged for it. If not, it can be compiled too.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=1apoFXZ9ad8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
As someone with a used 4U server… the noise, weight, cost, poeer consumption all are an inconvenience generally. I now have some mini PCs and I wish I started small and built up, rather than trying to treat myself with the best single solution possible.
It’s not one of the options you listed, but it’s worth considering a laptop since it has a UPS built in.
- Laptop with broken screen
Perfectly server grade, the way the manufacturer intended
Amen. Also they tend to draw less power than your average cheap desktop, so it’s a great middle ground between pc and sbc
I just decided to bite the bullet on paying for a Synology DS920+ and I don’t regret it at all. For media hosting on my scale, 4K direct or 1080p transcodes to 6 or less concurrent streams, it does everything I need it to do and it has pretty decent software.
Only problem that I have with mine is it just doesn’t have the power to transcode audio flawlessly. I have a lot of DTS content and it just stutters all the time. I had to set up a Tdarr pipeline just to add EAC3 tracks to everything.
I have not experienced this with any lossless transcodes and my friends streaming remote haven’t said anything about it. What client are you using to watch media?
It was streaming locally from my 920+ directly to my LG tv using the official Plex app on the tv and the Plex docker container on the NAS with iGPU passthrough. Tried it in both mp4 and mkv formats. Since the tv doesn’t support DTS it was transcoding into (I think) AAC. When I would change the playback from DTS to any other codec (for files with multiple formats), the video would play flawlessly, it was just the audio transcoding.
I think every time I’ve heard about the plex smart TV app it has not been positive lol
Gonna be honest, I don’t know the exact logistics behind plex transcoding and what resources it may or may not use on the client and I’ve never tried a smart TV app as a client. I’m really not in a place to comment on it. But I can attest to having no issues when transcoding lossless formats to windows or the Nvidia shield.
My $0.02c worth - I have run all sorts of servers at home over the years, and one of the main challenges around the hardware is managing heat.
I’ve used mini-ITX mobos and tiny cases for builds. They look gorgeous, but at some point, when you stick enough drives in there (assuming you can) or make the CPU/GPU busy, you are going to have a heat problem, or a noise problem, or both.
On my mythtv build I used M-itx and a gorgeous Lian Li small case. It was a beautiful add to my home theatre stack, but in the end I drilled a ton of small holes in the top and added a slow 140mm fan to control the heat without noise.
The same goes for my file server - it was a slightly larger case with no GPU, but once I added my 6th HDD and had a ton of services running, heat became an issue and I was having to add extra fans, which could only be 80mm so they ran fast and noisy.
My new build I’m going to go all the way with a Phanteks Enthoo Full Tower and a few 120mm fans. I’ve decided that looks don’t matter
The other problem for me with these tiny builds is cable management. I’m complete shit at it, and small builds requires some skills. A big case gives you space to spread those cables out.
Lastly, you can get ATX or EATX mobos with 6, 8 or more SATA connectors - room for growth! And there are very low power options available.
I’ll soon have the appleTV + TV upstairs, laptop in the office, and the monster server downstairs with cat-6 + Gb fibre throughout.
Same question here. I’m about ready to upgrade from my 8GB Pi 4B, but I’m overwhelmed by options and lost as to where to go next.
