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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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 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
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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.
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.
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 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.
Craigslist used optiplexes are my jam. Always less than $300, last for like 10 years, easy to find replacement parts for, sometimes cost less than a raspberry pi 4.
The downside is their power draw.
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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?
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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.
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Thanks for the link!
Because Pi’s chip is basically GPU with additional ARM processors, while for server use you need only CPU
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Yes, but it uses less part of space and power compared to Pi. On BCM chips ARM core relatively weak compared to VideoCore there.
Here’s what I did…
JONSBO N1 Mini Itx Case 5 HDD (Size of your choosing) Mini Itx MB AM4 ~500 Series Best/Cheapest Amd Processor with GPU (I got a R7 3800G) 350w Itx PSU RAM of your choosing
I use 2.5GBE for my network, so I just got a USB to 2.5GB Ethernet Adapter. So make sure the Mobo has USB 3.1 or 3.2, or a 2.5GBE Port. I bought most refurbished, or clearance. If you really wanna go crazy transcoding, you can pickup Tesla P4s for cheap on Ebay.
It’s low power, small, and powerful enough to run the whole suite of Arrs*, Jellyfin, Jellyseer, etc., etc.
There is no 3800G afaik
You are correct. It was a R5 5600g, sorry bout that…
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.
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
And usualy they ARE SBCs. So…
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.
I’ve tried a few of the things you mention over the years.
However, I’ve lately gotten into the used business PCs. The performance of even a 6th get Intel CPU more than double an RPI4 or the ATOM in my NAS, depending on how you count. Sure, it’s quite a bit more power, and they have their place (RPI in the garage), but I’ve gotten a few SFFs that have room for multiple HDs for like $50-$60 shipped, as long as i’m patient, since I don’t care for the windows license.
The CPU benchmark sites are what convinced me that more SBCs was not the solution for me.
I also tell myself that i’m recycling what could have been ewaste otherwise. I am afraid to calculate the energy cost.
I also try and ignore energy costs and prevent ewaste: my home server is my three builds back gaming PC with a lower power GPU shoved into it. Whenever I build a new main gaming PC my old one becomes my wife’s gaming PC, and her old PC is rebuilt into the home server.
Can you talk a bit more about the CPU benchmarking? What sites do you usually refer to? Is score the best metric or do you look for something else as well?
There are lots of them out there.
For example passmark is one of many.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
I just go find my CPU and use the number to compare to eBay listings. Is it perfect? No.
But it gives you an idea. Each site has some set of algorithms and they get a score for how quickly it can execute on that hardware.
Some of them they allow users to run their system and submit numbers so you get a better sense.
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 had a 10Gbps USB Icy Box enclosure, speeds were ok but cooling was simply inadequate. Now I have just built a pc with an Asus B550-Plus and a 5600G, idles at 19W with the drives in standby but with three fans active. I thought about going with a mini pc and a better external enclosure, but that would’ve been much more expensive and I doubt that I would’ve saved that much power with that anyway