Hello everyone.
Well, I’m here to ask for your insights and knowledge.
I have been self-hosting for almost a year already. Mainly proving things like Jellyfin, jellyseer and all the ARRs. All of this with a modest Raspberry Pi 4b using DietPi OS (which I think is great!)
Now, I want to move to the next stage, acquiring a more powerful machine.
What do you recommend for:
A) Mini PC. I want it to fast and with a huge storage (being able to increase it easily) B) SSD or HDD. Which ones. C) Operative System. I would like to stay on Linux.
Any other recommendations?
Finally, I have an adjusted budget, but pretend to save a bit more to have something nice :)
Thanks!
Regarding your question B:
I personally built a SSD-only homeserver, because of performance, noise and power efficiency. However, if you need much storage, the price difference gets really painful.
I’m referring you to my quick “self-hosting guide” for security and whatnot: https://lemmy.world/comment/7126969
With that said,
A) HP Mini second hand. Low power in the “T” CPU models, some have 2 nvme slots that can be used for extra storage with a cheap adapter like this + a power supply for the hard drives. If you don’t want to DIY it so much some also have USB type C ports (and Thunderbolt) that you can use to connect to an external drive enclosure or this one.
B) SSD for boot drive, run VMs etc, HDDs for long term storage
C) Debian as base system, no GUI. LXD/LXC as hypervisor to run all your stuff in containers and VMs. Or run everything directly on the machine.
Other recommendations:
- Use BTRFS as filesystem as much as possible;
- Aside from the big brands like HP and Dell there are other alternatives such as the trendy MINISFORUM however their BIOS comes out of the factory with weird bugs and the hardware isn’t as reliable - missing ESD protection on USB in some models and whatnot;
A) I’ve seen a lot of people recommending NUC100 computers, but the sata ports may be limited. I currently have my old computer doing the thing (an i5 6500) with Unraid OS, really happy with it BUT they are changing their paying model this week so I don’t know I would have went this way. I don’t like subscription models.
B) Why not both? I have two SSD of 512Gb for items currently downloading and two HDD for Capacity (each 8Tb) already 30% filled in 1month. Both set of hard drives are set in duplication mode to avoid losing any day.
The n100 mini PCs are a fantastic choice for hosting media server software primarily because of its transcoding capabilities.
The i5-6500 you have and the N100 perform very similarly with general compute tasks (though the TDW of the n100 is 6W vs 65W for the same performance). However, the N100 comes with the full Alder Lake Quick Sync engine compared to the Skylake engine on to i5-6500. If you review the hardware encode/decode table here, you can see Skylake HW encode/decode caps out at 8-bit HEVC (HDR 4K content is typically 10 or 12-bit HEVC), whereas the N100 supports even very recent codecs like 10-bit AV1. I recently set up Plex on a N100 mini PC I got for $150 (with 8gb RAM and 256gb NVMe drive included), and it was able to simultaneously do 2x 4K HDR transcodes with tone mapping while also doing a full library scan and credits detection. Of course, if you’re picky about what clients are watching your content to ensure they always watch original quality, you may not need to transcode.
That said, the N100 mini PC I purchased only has slots for 1 NVMe drive and one 2.5" SATA drive. In my case this was perfect because all my media is on a NAS which the N100 now access using a NFS mount, and I can easily back up the minimum persistent data on the N100 PC.
But it sounds like it wouldn’t 100% satisfy everything OP is looking for on its own. If they still wanted a N100 for the transcode capabilities, they may be able to use a USB HDD hardware enclosure to add additional storage capabilities without needing a separate system, but because I already had a NAS for my dedicated storage, it isn’t something I looked into with detail.
Just found this N100 as NAS looks good.
IPC N100 The same on Aliexpress
My I5 is around 25$ by year, so it would need to run for 10 years to break even with the cost of the motherboard alone.
But that’s incredible what they were able to do for low energy/compute.
Indeed. Sounds like in your case the i5 6500 you have is already suiting your needs, so really no need for more expense. For someone who doesn’t have something like that already though and needs to make a purchase, I’ve come around to generally recommending something like the n100 over a used older-generation processor simply because they cost very similar prices, but I feel you get a bit more with the more recent chips due to the modern HW encode/decode and low power use.
I was looking into Unraid OS, and it seems nice, and as you, I want to keep far away from subscriptions as much as possible.
My doubt with HDD is their speed, high noise and energy consumption.
Thanks for answering.
A really nice budget option is an old Lenovo or HP mini PC. These days they make thin client style machines that are absolutely tiny, use about as much power as a small laptop, and still have decent spec.
Storage wise, there’s room to fit a 2.5" drive inside, and newer ones have NVME slots. You can buy them real cheap from a refurb supplier as businesses are offloading them all the time.
In the same vein, a HP, Lenovo or Dell small form factor tower PC will up your power consumption a little, but give you room for a couple of 3.5" drives as well as an SSD. That’s enough to look at putting in a 12TB mirrored RAID for some serious storage. You’ve also got low profile PCI slots, so you can fit a GPU for faster re-encoding in Jellyfin.
check university and government surplus. EBay is rich with good models too
What is “huge storage”? What is your budget?
