from linkinkampf19@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 18 Oct 23:23
https://lemmy.world/post/37541631
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.
#selfhosted
threaded - newest
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
Can confirm, this is my setup and it works great.
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.
or aliexpress
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.
Ensure the CPU has hardware transcoding for the encoding you need. I wouldn’t go with older than intel 9th gen.
Please checkout this wiki guide here
While N100 is great for what it is, especially at a $200 budget, it can be limiting with its fairly small core/thread count if you expand beyond a handful of applications.
OP mentioned tinkering with multiple Linux flavors. A higher end cpu, with more cores and threads, would allow them to virtualize multiple instances on top of whatever other workloads they have and potentially not break a sweat while the N100 could struggle. While such an upgrade would be more expensive, price for performance will likely be significantly better if you can make use of it.
So I was spitballing there with the Linux stuff. Really I just wanna get something I can VNC into and be headless with a webUI. Something in the PopOS / Mint area if possible, but any other more specialized options could be nice. What would be a “next step up” from the n100 if you know? I’m seeing stuff in the 12th Gen arena as just that.
It’s tricky to make a recommendation as pretty much all the home lab stuff that people typically run can be done so on a potato, which is why RPis are so popular.
An N100 would definitely be a step up from the pis and meet your stated needs. They are super popular, in a multitude of formfactors so should be able to find something you like. But you may get the itch to upgrade further if you expect to expand or experiment extensively. Like any hobby, it’s generally easy to justify to yourself that you need to get that “next cool/better/faster/prettier thing” so such an itch may be unavoidable no matter what you get.
Instead of worrying about performance, as pretty much any modern miniPC should outclass a Pi, take a look at the specific form factors that are available. Do they have the expansion, networking you need? Can you stick this thing somewhere out of the way and not worry about it taking too much space or making too much noise? Are you comfortable with their level of support/warranty? Expect garbage/non-existent support from most of the miniPC specialty brands out there, which includes minisforum which I recommended in another comment. If you outgrow it, are you comfortable with it being e-waste/have a means of repurposing it?
Right on the money. I know that this’ll be a hobby I can grow for a while, just gotta find that balance of "is this good enough, or just one more device/peripheral/etc? Right now, I just wanna be able to shove it into my tiny network cabinet (the ones that are included with many new houses). This is what I’m working with currently:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/63efc157-c550-4e7f-b9fd-380962eb6d3c.jpeg">
Certainly far from winning any pageants lol. That said, The n100 units, or comparable, are the perfect size to shove into this (sans the two Pis already in there). And yeah, warranty/support-wise, I’m cool with this being an “I’m on my own”, as I don’t even know how far I’ll take this. The e-waste bit, well… I don’t really throw anything out. Not a hoarder outside of the digital sense, and repurposing tech is something I’m able to do working for a school district with young tinkerer minds, so to eventually hand this stuff down to them even if just for a stockpile of tech to mess with, is my end goal.
HAOS has add-ons to run a sort of managed version I think of pihole. Good start for containers.
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 started with a 2 bay Synology NAS (still have this as storage only and no computing) and added a 12the gen i5 mini PC I got on eBay for £230. That’s worked out great and I would highly recommend it. If you’re on a budget then look for some older hardware.
Docker is also not that difficult to get started with and worth messing around with to learn. I started on with Docker on my Synology and out grew that quickly and have been really happy with my mini PC.
So I couldn’t use Docker on my Synology as it wasn’t compatible, but I did try to try to use Docker, but it was most definitely a test install trying to squeeze Jellyfin and HA onto an 8GB card… yeah that didn’t work (I didn’t try too hard). I’ve heard of Docker Desktop, but sounds like it was not well received.
Don’t know what this means. Docker is universally loved and works perfectly on desktop OSs.
I’m running Debian on my server mini PC. Docker will work on any installation of Windows, Linux, etc and work perfectly well. I played around with it initially by setting up a virtual machine with Debian on my gaming computer and seeing if I could get Docker apps working.
Fast forward to now, and I’m kinda sad that my server is all set up and stable and I have nothing to tinker with.
The Docker Desktop comment was from literally one post stating it was junk vs the standard Docker Engine (GUI vs not), so I thought it was deeper than that. The only thing keeping me away from Docker now though is the inability to use deeper customization on HA. A comment above noted HACS can’t be used in the Docker container, which I use currently to control my Govee lighting.
Aww tho, having nothing to tinker with does fill the soul with sadness. As a fellow tinkerer I feel this, however I just fill my time then with extensive modding of games, or y’know, actually playing them :P
I don’t know much about Home Assistant, but you could keep that separate on an R.Pi of its own. Or install it as a native app on Debian if you use a desktop OS on your server.
Tinkering is fun. Home server is one of the few projects that have gone through to full completion. Silksong will take up my time for now till I find a new project. Might just make a new macropad for work.
Let me know if you want any details of my setup. I basically used 2 weeks off in July to set this whole thing up. There are lots of great Docker apps once you learn to set it up. AI has made this much easier to get into now.
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-e
Finally 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.
I’ve had good experience with the Minisforum MS-01, while it’s more than your $200 mentioned, it’s been worth every penny. Plenty of power for most homelabs and lots of nice features for future proofing (10gb, Ethernet, plenty of storage options, small but still usable pcie expansion slot) in a small form factor.
I’ve pretty much retired all my RPis at this point and my old Synology NAS is now just storage only with the MS-01 doing all the actual work.
Really don’t have a reason to migrate away from it for many years unless it died. Even then, you can create a promox cluster with them trivially to provide some redundancy.
They also have the a1 and a2 options for AMD but the a1 doesn’t have the same feature set and a2 is pretty expensive if you don’t need the extra power.
I’m finding some $200-ish options on ebay, but not sure offhand how they compare to the MS-01, as that’s definitely more than I’d like to spend. I am inching closer to $300, but that’ll just continue to fuel my indecisiveness :P
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…
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 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.
www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/…/sigmetrics09.pdf
@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’ve found that you don’t need to go that far above the $200 cost of an Intel N100/150 system to get a mini PC with a significantly more powerful AMD processor. It won’t be the latest generation but it will be capable of a lot more than those low-power Intels, and from my measurements many AMD processors of the last three generations or so are good at saving power when they’re idle, so it won’t use a ton more electricity. Sometimes you find used ones on eBay at a decent price because someone upgraded.
Would the 5000 series of AMD’s Ryzen 5/7 be a good bet to baseline with? Couple gens old now, so I’m thinking kinda cheap. Something like this from Beelink perhaps?
Yes, I think that’s reasonable. The midrange CPU in the Beelink you linked is already significantly more capable than the Intel N150 etc., though it has a TDP of 15W compared to the N150’s 6W. I haven’t dug into which specialized features they support (hardware codec support etc.) but for a general-purpose computer I’d definitely prefer the one you linked to those N100/N150 minis, even if it uses a little more power. Others might have a different opinion but that would be my choice.
I generally agree, but keep in mind that CPU TDP is not a good metric to predict the total power consumption of a home server. Most of the time, the CPU is in a very low power state and the power consumption is dominated by things like the mainboard, drives, PSU, … Wolfgang has a good video on the topic: youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=239
That said, the conclusion that the 5600U system draws more power than a N150 one is probably still correct in most cases.
Yeah, in all reality, I’m not too hung up about AMD/Intel, I was goofing in an earlier reply, and that was geared more towards the Nvidia/AMD perpetual battle. And that doesn’t matter much here as I’m not doing anything GPU intensive outside some possible transcoding, but even that may be unnecessary with my needs.
Thx for the video as well!
The Ryzen 5000 series should be a good choice for such an application, they’re still quite powerful CPUs. You should just make sure that you get the notebook/APU variant of the CPUs (e.g. 5600G or 5600U) and not the desktop variant (e.g. 5600 or 5600X). The desktop variant has significantly higher idle power consumption (see e.g. www.reddit.com/r/…/nas_idle_power_usage/, they report 50+W in idle, while my 8500G system idles at 17W). The one you linked should be fine.
But is it necessary? I’d rather focus more on the tdp.
I know I could just boost the tdp of the n150 if I did want more power, but I see people here running stuff on 10 year old laptops and older Intel n series stuff seemingly without a problem.
Wouldn’t that laptop use so much more power that it costs you more in electricity though? At least that is usually the problem I hear with it, not sure what a good low spec option is currently once electricity prices are included. IIRC N150 is pretty good, not sure if there are other good/better options though.
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: github.com/a-little-wifi/TinySecrets
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 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 🤷♂️). 😊
gmktec.com/…/nucbox-g3-plus-enhanced-performance-…
This is going well for me - Jellyfin etc
Wow, yeah this looks great. 16GB/512GB for under $200 makes this a frontrunner for now. Outside of Jellyfin, what else do you run, and how do you have it containerized? I’m inching closer to Proxmox vs Docker due to issues brought up in other comments.
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.
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’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.
Fedora works for both of those
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.
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:
a.co/d/dDdzptv
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!
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!
Maybe you enjoy the “getting it to work” part more than me. I went from RPi to a cheap used miniPC from eBay. Installed Debian and bought a wireless keyboard with touchpad. Cheap and so much simpler. Plays all my flac music through Strawberry, plays all my movies at home and away. Easiest VPN setup, I don’t use smart functions of my TV, just the miniPC for everything.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I get burnout myself if I’m hovering on a hobby for too long, but tinkering is in my blood. I’m sure I’ll have moments where I’m just thinking, “Fuck it, Imma play some gaems instead.”, but that itch is bound to come back.
I am curious what VPN you use tho. Been shopping around, and the unfortunate news that the big services are owned by a particular company kinda stalled my research.
We appear to have a similar affliction. I’m let down terribly by a lack of expertise, and so take a best alternative in most cases. My VPN is Mullvad. I’m due renewal in the next 2 months so will be pondering simple renewal vs switching to ProtonVPN. The purity of Mullvad privacy is wasted on me as the only real difference appears to be the option to pay by bitcoin or cash. Proton appears to have more options and less likely to be blocked if you go away on holiday etc.
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).
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/8df44e96-b523-439a-8a41-9650d1022664.jpeg">
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.
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.
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.
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.
Used to run on a pi 4 but moved to a 11th Gen NUC and wouldn’t go back. Well, the pi was nice when I didn’t have any money but the performance boost of just an i3 is hard to beat. With headless debian 13, the nuc now draws 5w idle. Seriously low consumption, costs like 10eur in electric energy per year. Pi 4 still found a home for homeassistant +zigbee stack.
Damn right. As much as I love my Pis, they have minimal headroom for what I’m looking at doing. This upgrade is great esp with the ability to consolidate all my stuff into one unit. As for power use, the lower the better as I’m guessing the setup will be idling majority of the time, and “vampire power” still sits in the back of my brain. In another comment I placed anything below 50w as a good limit.
As for my Pi4, I’m looking at possibly gifting to a friend as their primary devices don’t handle x265 at all, but I have plenty of options to repurpose both it and even the Pi3. I do need to look into Zigbee stuff though. Still an alien term to me lol.
Get a N100/N150 system with 12GB+ RAM for ~150 €/$. Alternatively check for one with replaceable RAM.
To get experience with Linux you can install VirtualBox on Windows and set up some Linux virtual machines. It’s easier than most people think.
Thanks! Yeah I’m thinking I should get a higher RAM setup just for flexibility’s sake and futureproofing so some extent. 16GB was my bare minimum, but I’m looking at some configs with 32GB and they aren’t too much pricier. The soldered RAM is def iffy, as I like having the options to improve a build without too much headache, or no solid upgrade path whatsoever.
As for the Linux stuff, I’ve dabbled in it, and currently run ZorinOS on an old Thinkpad. It’s not heavily used, but it’s similar enough to Windows (as are many flavors), that the difficulty curve for me boils down to terminal stuff. I jump between Powershell, MacOS Terminal, and this on a roughly weekly basis, but by no means am I a scholar :P