Would you recommend to use a RPi 5 or a second hand Lenovo mini pc (i3 6100t, 8gb ram) or something else?
I just repurposed one of our older PCs for that task. Slap Ubuntu on it, install webmin, and you’re set up.
A 35W i7-7700T mini PC from 2017 will absolutely spank a modern N150 in single and multi–threaded applications, and uses very little extra power to do so.
Mini PC is the way to go.
I love my micros.
100% this. And Lenovos and HPs designed for the business market generally are a pleasure to work on (in the hardware sense) if you need, with good manuals and secondhand spare parts.
Oh for sure. I’ve got a handful of SFFs and mini PCs making up my little “homelab”:
(Yes, that’s the furnace. No, it’s not hot there. Ever. I’ve checked on it many, many times.)
I’ve also got another pair of Optiplex 9020s, an Optiplex 3040, and my old trusty HP Elite 8100 SFF w/8300 SFF mobo, i7-3770/32GB, and modded BIOS that supports booting from NVMe (via it.s M.2 PCIe card). Those are sitting in the closet just taking up space at the moment.
eBay supplied the 7050 and the mini PCs. My sister gave me the other Optiplexen from her work office.
Raspberry Pi 5 exists?
Oh neat! https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/
For two years, yes.
Mini PC
Overwhelming majority of my servers are tiny/mini/micros.
I would avoid a Raspi/ARM at all costs. But there is a third alternative: A x86 SBC like a Zima Board or blade might be exactly what you are looking for. Small, powerful enough and far easier than an ARM to maintain.
usually works well enough, but some aren’t built great and can have stability issues. i usually have the thing running for a few months with light tasks to ensure it’s stable before putting it into critical use.
external usb-sata enclosures cause a lot of issues, so i test those as well.
Raspberry pi: No. Or, at least, not without doing something to make sure you have a real storage backend and aren’t just running it off an SD card. The wear on SD cards is exaggerated and largely minimized if you use an OS that is configured to be aware of it but you are also increasingly relying on a ticking time bomb.
Mini PC/NUC? I am a huge fan of these and think they are what most people actually need for stuff like home assistant, adguard, etc. Just understand you are going to be storage limited sooner than you expect and you can oversubscribe that CPU and memory a lot faster than you would expect.
My general suggestion? Install proxmox on the mini PC and deploy on top of that. If/when you decide you want something more, migration is usually pretty easy.
And if you just want a NAS? It is really hard to go wrong with a 4 bay NAS from one of the reputable vendors (which may just be ugreen at this point?) as those tend to still come out cheaper than building it yourself and 4 disks means you can either play with fire with RAID5 or not be stupid and do RAID1.
And if you just want a NAS? It is really hard to go wrong with a 4 bay NAS from one of the reputable vendors (which may just be ugreen at this point?) as those tend to still come out cheaper than building it yourself and 4 disks means you can either play with fire with RAID5 or not be stupid and do RAID1.
Actually ASUS started to sell N100 motherboards with the CPU soldered on for $120
That plus a jonsbo N2 or N3, a few extra pieces, and its a few hundred dollars cheaper than the Ugreen options. Sure it will probably run Truenas instead of Ugreens custom truenas or whatever its built on, but that extra $300 is another 24TB hard drive or a HexOS lifetime subscription.
There’s also always the classic buy an old mid sized tower for $100 and slap two massive hard drives in it
Oh yeah, that is true. Mini PC has a proper ssd nvme.
Thanks for the feedback! Will look at the NAS you recommend, but i thik i want more freedom to tinker. Will definitely look into proxmox!
Just get a used PC and make a NAS. No need to buy a premade on.
I don’t have direct experience with them, but my understanding from youtubes is that the ugreen NASes are specifically designed for you to just ignore their OS and install your own (so truenas or proxmox).
Hardware tinkering is more limited but… there is very much a question of how much of that people actually do.
The first thing I did with my ugreen was install truenas, then learn how to use truenas.
While I’ve migrated several docker compose apps over, I feel I’m still learning the truenas part of the system.
Whatever is cheapest. When youre first starting out basically any hardware will do, it just needs to boot Linux. As you progress and find more stuff to put on the servers, you’ll discover what you’re real hardware needs are.
When I first started, it was a hand me down single core AMD Sempron machine (socket 754!) that I later upgraded to an Athlon64 and 4gb of DDR. I managed to bodge that poor thing into running a Minecraft 1.5.2 server.
Personally I would stick with the i3 machine since I am assuming it’s an office PC that can be had for cheaper than a Pi 5 (which is quite inflated in price IMO). x86 still retains better software support vs ARM and they are significantly easier to attach large cheap storage to via SATA. Power cost will be greater but I doubt an office i3 pulls more than 70w wall power at full load.
Thanks for the feedback! And yes, used mini pc can be found cheaper than rpi5, also comes with a proper cooling and housing, which would be extra for rpi.
When youre first starting out basically any hardware will do, it just needs to boot Linux.
Unless you already use Linux, you don’t need to start with Linux. Windows works perfectly and is significantly easier for most people as it’s what they already know.
The Mini PC would be a lot easier. The RPi needs things to be built for ARM, and not everything is. The RPi is also slower and isn’t repairable.
RPis are great for many things, but generic home servers aren’t one of them, unless you really need clustering for some reason (like, a Ceph cluster).
I built a home server based on an Intel N100 motherboard a while ago. I’ve put proxmox on it and run my Home Assistant installation, Nextcloud, several other stuff and even my router as an OpenWRT VM!
I chose to go the N100 motherboard route mainly due to the flexibility it offers. But you can just buy a N100 based NUC and you get effectively the same performance and incredible low power consumption.
I would recommend against the Pi 5. It is way underpowered in my opinion. Plus with a x86 system you just have a lot more software compatibility.
Similarly here. Have an Odroid with that platform, it wasn’t cheap but it came with several advantages:
- 4 SATA ports on addition to the M2 slot
- Intel QSV
- 2 x 2.5 Gbit Ethernet (I only have gigabit at home though)
Very powerful machine for the power usage, I ran a really old Athlon before though (from 2010 or so that I retrofitted with 16GB RAM) that did most stuff just fine. But I wanted some transcoding and also possibly a smaller case.
I run everything bare metal though.
I’ve have amazing luck with both Beelink and Minisforum computers. They’re relatively cheap and excellent quality.
I personally use the Beelink ME Mini and it’s been able to handle just fine about any server tasks I need it to, not to mention the wildly expandable storage.
I bought a generic N150 based minipc for a firewall & router (running OPNsense), and repurposed an old desktop PC as a server to host immich, paperless, nextcloud, etc… I considered both RPi and mini pc for the server, but I needed a few TB of storage and wanted redundancy. Spinny disks were a much more affordable option than SSDs, and minipcs and Rpis tend to not have much space for those drives. You can add on storage to them, but then they just become clunkier and more expensive than the old PC I already had laying around. Power consumption is probably a few watts higher on the PC than a Pi would be, but it’s not terrible.
That’s why I went the direction I did. I’m 3 about or 4 months in, and it’s been solid so far.
i3 6100 is on the lower end, but it depends on what you plan to do with it.
Is it going to be a general purpose file server? A media server through jellyfin, etc.? If a media server, do you need to transcode?
NAS, perhaps apps like vaultwarden, nextcloud, immich, maybe grafana for sensors… I am not 100% sure as this would be the first.
I think they should be roughly in a similar range for selfhosting?! They’re both power-efficient. And probably have enough speed for the average task. There might be a few perks with the ThinkCentre Tiny. I haven’t looked it up but I think you should be able to fit an SSD and a harddrive and maybe swap the RAM if you need more. And they’re sometimes on sale somewhere and should be cheaper than a RasPI 5 plus required extras.
