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?
It’s up to you how much you want to pay vs. how much time you are willing to sink into it. A synology is overpriced and underpowered, but you get a nice plug and play solution eith sane defaults. I went with that, fully knowing that price-wise, it’s not optimal. But I don’t enjoy tinkering as much as I used to.
Since Debian has added RISC-V as a supported architecture, we should start seeing most major software like Docker and KVM being packaged for it. If not, it can be compiled too.
I have a DIY NAS… Not sure of specs any more. Some micro-atx board with a cheaper AMD CPU. All it’s for is an NFS share and I use almost no resources on it.
I have a bunch of PI4 8GB and lenovo m92p tinys that I use for the compute. Their storage is the DIY NAS.
If I was starting out and planned on growing m’y setup, id go option 4. Just do an all in one thing, run everything on it. When you run out of ram/CPU consider a pi or mini like I have. When you need more disk, add it into the NAS.
If you just want something simple option 1. USB will 100% limit transfer speed but what kind of speed do you actually need? What will you run?
I think I had the misconception that USB was slower than SATA, but USB-C is actually just as fast. And anything USB 3.0+ should be faster than 1 gigabit ethernet I guess?
Theoretically, USBC 3.1 has 10Gbit/s from what I’m reading so it sounds like you’re right. My concern is the chipset on the MoBo, how many lanes it has, and what it supports. I haven’t looked into it but I bet this is the limiting factor. Especially if you’re adding a lot of USB devices.
Yep, just an old PC that I moved into a case with hotswap hard drive bays. I also bought a LSI 9300-8i to support the hard drives.
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
Do you have a NAS? It can be a good way to get decent functionality without extra hardware, especially if you’re doing proof of concept or temporary stuff.
My self-hosting Docker setup is split between 12 permanent stacks on a Synology DS920+ NAS (with upgraded RAM) and 4 on a Raspberry Pi 4B, using Portainer and its agent on the Pi to manage them. The NAS is also using Synology’s Drive (like Dropbox or GDrive) and Photos (like Google Photos).
I’ve had the NAS running servers for Valheim and VRising in the past, but they require that fewer containers be running, as game servers running on Linux usually have no optimisation and/or are emulating Windows.
If I decide to host a game server again, I’ll probably look at a NUC. I’ve done the DIY mini-ITX route in the past (for an XBMC-based media centre with HDMI output) and it was great, so that’s another option.
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.
My $0.02c worth - I have run all sorts of servers at home over the years, and one of the main challenges around the hardware is managing heat.
I’ve used mini-ITX mobos and tiny cases for builds. They look gorgeous, but at some point, when you stick enough drives in there (assuming you can) or make the CPU/GPU busy, you are going to have a heat problem, or a noise problem, or both.
On my mythtv build I used M-itx and a gorgeous Lian Li small case. It was a beautiful add to my home theatre stack, but in the end I drilled a ton of small holes in the top and added a slow 140mm fan to control the heat without noise.
The same goes for my file server - it was a slightly larger case with no GPU, but once I added my 6th HDD and had a ton of services running, heat became an issue and I was having to add extra fans, which could only be 80mm so they ran fast and noisy.
My new build I’m going to go all the way with a Phanteks Enthoo Full Tower and a few 120mm fans. I’ve decided that looks don’t matter
The other problem for me with these tiny builds is cable management. I’m complete shit at it, and small builds requires some skills. A big case gives you space to spread those cables out.
Lastly, you can get ATX or EATX mobos with 6, 8 or more SATA connectors - room for growth! And there are very low power options available.
I’ll soon have the appleTV + TV upstairs, laptop in the office, and the monster server downstairs with cat-6 + Gb fibre throughout.
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.
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.
If you want x86-64 support in fanless, take a look at Celeron (low powered) based industrial PCs. Qotom comes to mind. You can get a passively cooled machine. Most come with a NVMe and 2.5 slot for storage, do doing raid 1 is possible without external storage. I’ve bern running my J1900 based one for nearly 5 years and haven’t had an issue with hardware at all.
I run proxmox on a System76 Thelio. ZFS mirror, 16 cores, 64GB. Synology NAS for data storage and backup. Dual NICs bonded with ovs for the VMs. The onboard NIC for connecting to proxmox itself. One of the VMs then rclones the backup share to rsync.net
One of the VMs is Plex/Sonarr/Radarr/Transmission. Media is stored via NFS to the NAS.
I don’t like lxc containers, and my build automation works well at the full system level vs containers.
Running your services bare metal these days is insane. If I have a problem, I just restore or rebuild that purpose-built vm from configuration management. This is also a lot more flexible and cost effective vs having separate hardware for each thing.
Redundancy is also easier, should I decide it is worth the hardware investment.
While you are correct with insanity of running bare-metal, this argument is manipulative. Indeed, no sane person will ditch existing kernel(e.g. Linux of FreeBSD) and write one themselve, running program in common OS is not bare-metal.
Another manipulation is VM vs per-dervice dedicated hardware.
Redundancy is also easier, should I decide it is worth the hardware investment.
As an owner of the HC-2, I’d say if you don’t need to transcode and you really only need qBitTorrent and Jellyfin, the HC-4 should be an awesome NAS and media host. You really only need more power when you have scope creep, and you realize you want your home server to do more and more. In any case it’s a pretty low cost of entry, should you choose to upgrade in the future.
As someone with a used 4U server… the noise, weight, cost, poeer consumption all are an inconvenience generally. I now have some mini PCs and I wish I started small and built up, rather than trying to treat myself with the best single solution possible.
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It’s up to you how much you want to pay vs. how much time you are willing to sink into it. A synology is overpriced and underpowered, but you get a nice plug and play solution eith sane defaults. I went with that, fully knowing that price-wise, it’s not optimal. But I don’t enjoy tinkering as much as I used to.
I’ve been getting pretty excited about RISC-V devices. They are quite efficient and outstrip similiar SOCs in many ways.
The Lichee Pi4A has better benchmarks than a Raspberry Pi 4 at a TDP of 4W and includes a NPU. They are coming out with a cluster board as well.
Cristopher Barnatt does a review of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1apoFXZ9ad8
Since Debian has added RISC-V as a supported architecture, we should start seeing most major software like Docker and KVM being packaged for it. If not, it can be compiled too.
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I have a DIY NAS… Not sure of specs any more. Some micro-atx board with a cheaper AMD CPU. All it’s for is an NFS share and I use almost no resources on it.
I have a bunch of PI4 8GB and lenovo m92p tinys that I use for the compute. Their storage is the DIY NAS.
If I was starting out and planned on growing m’y setup, id go option 4. Just do an all in one thing, run everything on it. When you run out of ram/CPU consider a pi or mini like I have. When you need more disk, add it into the NAS.
If you just want something simple option 1. USB will 100% limit transfer speed but what kind of speed do you actually need? What will you run?
Is your NAS in an old tower PC?
I think I had the misconception that USB was slower than SATA, but USB-C is actually just as fast. And anything USB 3.0+ should be faster than 1 gigabit ethernet I guess?
Theoretically, USBC 3.1 has 10Gbit/s from what I’m reading so it sounds like you’re right. My concern is the chipset on the MoBo, how many lanes it has, and what it supports. I haven’t looked into it but I bet this is the limiting factor. Especially if you’re adding a lot of USB devices.
Yep, just an old PC that I moved into a case with hotswap hard drive bays. I also bought a LSI 9300-8i to support the hard drives.
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
Do you have a NAS? It can be a good way to get decent functionality without extra hardware, especially if you’re doing proof of concept or temporary stuff.
My self-hosting Docker setup is split between 12 permanent stacks on a Synology DS920+ NAS (with upgraded RAM) and 4 on a Raspberry Pi 4B, using Portainer and its agent on the Pi to manage them. The NAS is also using Synology’s Drive (like Dropbox or GDrive) and Photos (like Google Photos).
I’ve had the NAS running servers for Valheim and VRising in the past, but they require that fewer containers be running, as game servers running on Linux usually have no optimisation and/or are emulating Windows.
If I decide to host a game server again, I’ll probably look at a NUC. I’ve done the DIY mini-ITX route in the past (for an XBMC-based media centre with HDMI output) and it was great, so that’s another option.
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.
Is there some low-power hardware that takes ECC RAM? I want something to replace my Atom mini-ITX board, but I also want ECC.
My $0.02c worth - I have run all sorts of servers at home over the years, and one of the main challenges around the hardware is managing heat.
I’ve used mini-ITX mobos and tiny cases for builds. They look gorgeous, but at some point, when you stick enough drives in there (assuming you can) or make the CPU/GPU busy, you are going to have a heat problem, or a noise problem, or both.
On my mythtv build I used M-itx and a gorgeous Lian Li small case. It was a beautiful add to my home theatre stack, but in the end I drilled a ton of small holes in the top and added a slow 140mm fan to control the heat without noise.
The same goes for my file server - it was a slightly larger case with no GPU, but once I added my 6th HDD and had a ton of services running, heat became an issue and I was having to add extra fans, which could only be 80mm so they ran fast and noisy.
My new build I’m going to go all the way with a Phanteks Enthoo Full Tower and a few 120mm fans. I’ve decided that looks don’t matter
The other problem for me with these tiny builds is cable management. I’m complete shit at it, and small builds requires some skills. A big case gives you space to spread those cables out.
Lastly, you can get ATX or EATX mobos with 6, 8 or more SATA connectors - room for growth! And there are very low power options available.
I’ll soon have the appleTV + TV upstairs, laptop in the office, and the monster server downstairs with cat-6 + Gb fibre throughout.
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.
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.
This is the correct answer. And I think in September most companies do hardware refresh so keep an eye on ebay
If you want x86-64 support in fanless, take a look at Celeron (low powered) based industrial PCs. Qotom comes to mind. You can get a passively cooled machine. Most come with a NVMe and 2.5 slot for storage, do doing raid 1 is possible without external storage. I’ve bern running my J1900 based one for nearly 5 years and haven’t had an issue with hardware at all.
I run proxmox on a System76 Thelio. ZFS mirror, 16 cores, 64GB. Synology NAS for data storage and backup. Dual NICs bonded with ovs for the VMs. The onboard NIC for connecting to proxmox itself. One of the VMs then rclones the backup share to rsync.net
One of the VMs is Plex/Sonarr/Radarr/Transmission. Media is stored via NFS to the NAS.
The Thelio looks awesome, but it seems overkill for what to do and spend. I would probably do DIY if I wanted something with the specs of the Thelio.
Why VMs?
I don’t like lxc containers, and my build automation works well at the full system level vs containers.
Running your services bare metal these days is insane. If I have a problem, I just restore or rebuild that purpose-built vm from configuration management. This is also a lot more flexible and cost effective vs having separate hardware for each thing.
Redundancy is also easier, should I decide it is worth the hardware investment.
While you are correct with insanity of running bare-metal, this argument is manipulative. Indeed, no sane person will ditch existing kernel(e.g. Linux of FreeBSD) and write one themselve, running program in common OS is not bare-metal.
Another manipulation is VM vs per-dervice dedicated hardware.
Same thing valid for regular userland.
As an owner of the HC-2, I’d say if you don’t need to transcode and you really only need qBitTorrent and Jellyfin, the HC-4 should be an awesome NAS and media host. You really only need more power when you have scope creep, and you realize you want your home server to do more and more. In any case it’s a pretty low cost of entry, should you choose to upgrade in the future.
It’s not one of the options you listed, but it’s worth considering a laptop since it has a UPS built in.
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…
As someone with a used 4U server… the noise, weight, cost, poeer consumption all are an inconvenience generally. I now have some mini PCs and I wish I started small and built up, rather than trying to treat myself with the best single solution possible.
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.