Would you recommend to use a RPi 5 or a second hand Lenovo mini pc (i3 6100t, 8gb ram) or something else?
Use whatever you have lying around when you start and then when you need new hardware for a certain purpose you can buy it going with the system requirements of that software.
Mini PC. Beelinks with the N100 chip are absolute beasts at doing video encoding at low power.
Almost a year of S12 mini as services/HTPC. Cant be happier!
I also recommend Beelink. I’ve been running an eqr6 (ryzen) for almost a year and it’s been awesome.
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.
That shelf sag scares me, sir. At least reinforce each layer with a slab of plywood or something.
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.
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.
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.
Beelink ME Mini
Would something like this be suitable as a NAS + Jellyfin + Home Assistant box?
That is exactly what I use mine for and it does it pretty much silently.
I just repurposed one of our older PCs for that task. Slap Ubuntu on it, install webmin, and you’re set up.
What is webmin, i’ve never heard of it?
Linux server administration tool, web interface based. Makes managing servers way easier.
Thanks!
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.
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.
For a (first) NAS, I generally discourage this.
Office liquidation desktops are great for home servers (if you aren’t paying for power). But they generally are very limited on storage. Limited bays to install hard drives and limited SATA ports. So you rapidly end up with drives just sitting on the bottom of the case and real jank pcie boards to extend your storage.
Which then becomes a HUGE issue when you have a drive failure. Because now you need to actually identify which drive is the failed one which involves reading off serial numbers and, depending on the setup/OS, making sure you get the order right when you plug them back in.
Whereas a 4-bay NAS generally has dedicated hardware and hot swap bays which make this trivial. You might never actually use the hot swap capability, but it makes checking which drive is the bad drive fairly trivial.
Also, a good 4 bay NAS is REAL easy to unplug and put in the trunk of your car during a disaster. Don’t ask me how I know.
Raspberry Pi 5 exists?
Oh neat! https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/
For two years, yes.
