I’m moderately tech savvy, a little experience with most OS and comfortable with hardware. I’ve got some basic things working in Docker. I want to start self hosting my photo backup, Bitwarden, Jellyfish, Sonarr and Radarr, Pi hole, Home Assistant and replace Dropbox. But the more I dive into the hardware and setup the more muddled I’m finding myself.
I’m very concerned about power draw so the lower the consumption the better. I do want some parity, though I’m willing to I introduce that once it’s set up. I’m not particularly concerned with transcoding but I guess it’d be a nice bonus.
Is a QNAP alone valid? Or perhaps I’m better off with a Pi and my huge GDrive while I learn? Or a NUC with better transcoding capability? I want to access my data internally, stream content to a Chromecast with Google TV.
My instinct is both a NUC and a separate NAS but I’e love it if anyone has some insight.
A used Thinkcenter Tiny off eBay is cheaper than a NUC and has better performance than a Pi. HP and Dell have similar tiny PCs that are inexpensive used. A separate NAS would probably be best, but you could start with a USB 3 external drive and shuck it later.
7th gen i5 NUCs can be found on eBay for under $100 shipped with 16gb of ram and a small m2 drive. They’re not as powerful as a larger SFF chip, but at 15w TDP is pretty hard to beat. I have four of them now. I pick one up every time a find a good deal.
This is the route I went. SFF PC with I5 3rd gen, 8GB RAM and about 20 docker Containers running at the moment @ 10% - 15% CPU usage and 3GB memory.
Power consumption is around 15W. A bit more than a Raspi but much more potent and with a easy upgrade path.
So far I have absolutely no rerets. For most things self hosted the cpu is not that important. Even transcoding is no problem with the integrated iGPU.
You can get the power consumption down to 5W by using the smaller versions. My HP prodesk g3 800 mini draws 5W and is perfectly capable of running docker, Jellyfin, etc.
This is great, thanks. And thanks for the offer! Loads of helpful people here. I read it’s better to go to at least 8th gen intel for efficiency etc but I guess I’ll cost things up and see what fits.
If you can find a second hand PC with a Celeron, they’re pretty low draw, and it will mean you can open it up and add as many drives as it has SATA ports. We did the same, got an old PC for £30 and added drives and more RAM.
I currently have an HBA that breaks it into 8 DATA connections and was wondering if an 8 port SATA controller would be lower power usage and work as well. My HBA is a server one and rather old, it’s a Dell H310 flashed. Then again I am thinking of replacing the MB and upgrade to a newer CPU that is more energy efficient than my current Xeon E3-1270 just can’t seem to find the right one.
I’m far from an expert in HBAs and never used one myself. but it is my understanding that the major advantage is that you’re extremely unlikely to get a janky one whereas Sata controllers could be bad (they are often cheaply made non brand products). if they work either one is fine in a hone lab setting.
My solution for a power efficient setup was to split it up: all the services I use but don’t need all the time, like jellyfin for example, I host on my nas. I only turn that on when I need it.
The stuff that’s running all the time, like home assistant, addblocker, etc, I run on a raspberry pi.
Might not work for everyone, but I’m happy with it.
I went the mini-computer route, like a NUC, and used an external HDD. I regret not having HDD bays for internal storage needs. I’ve been looking at used desktops (Optiplex for example) that would allow me to use internal HDDs easily.
As I’d like to not back myself into a regretful purchase immediately, wouldn’t direct attached raid like a TR-004 work in addition to your NUC or am I missing something?
Not the person you replied to, but the only thing on your list with real processing requirements is Jellyfish, if you do transcoding. My pihole uses like 0.3 CPU on a pi4, HA 0.1, zwave2mqtt less than that. You’re more likely to run into bandwidth issues with sonarr/radarr/dropbox, because pi’s just can’t push data to disks very fast, but if you’re doing downloads in the background, maybe that’s no a big deal.
I used two pies. Rpi3 for home assistant, pihole and zigbee+mqtt. rpi4 for arr stack and nextcloud with a 5TB disk on it. Swiched to everything in a i3 NUC 11 i got for 200eur. Works better, uses less power if you can believe it.
A note about transcoding: I dont know your setup but I never needed it. All video I have is encoded in h264 or HEVC and all my video player devices support these codecs natively. The last time I needed to transcode was 10 years ago when all I had for a media player was a Wii and a movie in HEVC.
Honestly servers don’t need to be speced out of oblivion. I use a 10 year old desktop and added a 1TB ssd and it does 99% of what I want it too.
Most important thing for a server is probably the CPU and making sure it has as many cores as possible and maybe hyper threading because you’ll be running a lot if simultaneous services and users.
Get a power measuring device if you don’t have one and consider the real cost of buying something new if you already have something. For instance, I have an older gaming laptop I am considering repurposing for my home automation stuff. While idling it draws about 10w which is amazing to me and a number I never would have guessed. For me that works out to (24 hours * 10w * 365 days* 1000w/Kw ) 87kwh per year. I pay about 10 cents per kwh so say $10 a year. Buying something to save a little power will never work out.
My current home server is an intel NUC from 2013! It can’t do some of the things I would like to add on, but it is a great media server and downloader. Powerful hardware isn’t really a necessity.
Mine is a 2700X on a B450I with 2 HDDs and 1 NVMe drive at 40W idle. Add an Arc A380 and it idles at 60W. We pay 0.30€ per kWh, so that means to run my server it is 158€ per year without any video transcoding.
Hardware was pretty cheap and it is over-powered, but I pay for it… hopefully getting solar soon!
I have a 4 bay Synology and an HP G2 800 i7-6700, plus a POE switch, couple of cameras, omada WAP. The software load is mostly Jellyfin and Syncthing plus a BOINC LXC that pegs one core. Power consumption generally sits at around 55-65W (my APC UPS has a power readout) from memory the idle was pretty low - I think 24W although that might have been the previous 2 bay NAS.
I think your plan of a NUC and a NAS (I’d stick to 2 bay) is a good compromise for low power and easy of setup/management. I have my NAS configured to keep the rust spinning - I’m sure I’d save a bit of power by letting it spin down, but the delay when I starting some media in Jellyfin was annoying, and I suspect the disks will live longer moving anyway.
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A used Thinkcenter Tiny off eBay is cheaper than a NUC and has better performance than a Pi. HP and Dell have similar tiny PCs that are inexpensive used. A separate NAS would probably be best, but you could start with a USB 3 external drive and shuck it later.
I have considered this but I imagine power draw would be much improved with a NUC.
7th gen i5 NUCs can be found on eBay for under $100 shipped with 16gb of ram and a small m2 drive. They’re not as powerful as a larger SFF chip, but at 15w TDP is pretty hard to beat. I have four of them now. I pick one up every time a find a good deal.
8th gens are still really expensive.
Thank you. I’ve seen a decent deal (£150) on an 8th gen i7 but only 8 gigs ram and a 256gig SSD. Thinking it might be a good option
Out of the options you listed, I’d go with the NUC for performance and transcoding.
Check out Serve the home’s TinyMiniMicro project: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC53fzn9608B-MT5KvuuHct5MiUDO8IF4&si=1Yx9e7TqLSUlYF3g
This is the route I went. SFF PC with I5 3rd gen, 8GB RAM and about 20 docker Containers running at the moment @ 10% - 15% CPU usage and 3GB memory.
Power consumption is around 15W. A bit more than a Raspi but much more potent and with a easy upgrade path.
So far I have absolutely no rerets. For most things self hosted the cpu is not that important. Even transcoding is no problem with the integrated iGPU.
If you have further questions I am happy to help.
You can get the power consumption down to 5W by using the smaller versions. My HP prodesk g3 800 mini draws 5W and is perfectly capable of running docker, Jellyfin, etc.
And it was only 100€, which is pretty awesome.
Ooo that is cheap! What gen proc do you use in yours?
It’s an i5 6500t, and yes, it was a pretty good deal (local guy).
It’s obviously an older chip, but it’s still very capable and the machine has an m.2 and sata ports, so adding storage shouldn’t be a problem.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/playlist?list=PLC53fzn9608B-MT5KvuuHct5MiUDO8IF4&si=1Yx9e7TqLSUlYF3g
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This is great, thanks. And thanks for the offer! Loads of helpful people here. I read it’s better to go to at least 8th gen intel for efficiency etc but I guess I’ll cost things up and see what fits.
If you can find a second hand PC with a Celeron, they’re pretty low draw, and it will mean you can open it up and add as many drives as it has SATA ports. We did the same, got an old PC for £30 and added drives and more RAM.
More. PCIe SATA controllers are cheap (even though you’ll often hear “get a HBA and flash it”, it’s not absolutely necessary).
I currently have an HBA that breaks it into 8 DATA connections and was wondering if an 8 port SATA controller would be lower power usage and work as well. My HBA is a server one and rather old, it’s a Dell H310 flashed. Then again I am thinking of replacing the MB and upgrade to a newer CPU that is more energy efficient than my current Xeon E3-1270 just can’t seem to find the right one.
I’m far from an expert in HBAs and never used one myself. but it is my understanding that the major advantage is that you’re extremely unlikely to get a janky one whereas Sata controllers could be bad (they are often cheaply made non brand products). if they work either one is fine in a hone lab setting.
Ah good point. Even more then :)
My solution for a power efficient setup was to split it up: all the services I use but don’t need all the time, like jellyfin for example, I host on my nas. I only turn that on when I need it.
The stuff that’s running all the time, like home assistant, addblocker, etc, I run on a raspberry pi.
Might not work for everyone, but I’m happy with it.
Worth thinking about for sure, thanks.
I went the mini-computer route, like a NUC, and used an external HDD. I regret not having HDD bays for internal storage needs. I’ve been looking at used desktops (Optiplex for example) that would allow me to use internal HDDs easily.
As I’d like to not back myself into a regretful purchase immediately, wouldn’t direct attached raid like a TR-004 work in addition to your NUC or am I missing something?
Yes, that could work. I don’t have a NAS and prefer to have everything in one box, but a separate NAS could work too.
Same mistake but I can live with it. The mini form factor is just too cute and uses so little power. Unusable for a data hoarder but passable for me.
I’m a big raspi fan but I think the Pi 4 will be overpowered for your needs.
You mean underpowered?
Sorry, I did mean under powered.
Not the person you replied to, but the only thing on your list with real processing requirements is Jellyfish, if you do transcoding. My pihole uses like 0.3 CPU on a pi4, HA 0.1, zwave2mqtt less than that. You’re more likely to run into bandwidth issues with sonarr/radarr/dropbox, because pi’s just can’t push data to disks very fast, but if you’re doing downloads in the background, maybe that’s no a big deal.
I used two pies. Rpi3 for home assistant, pihole and zigbee+mqtt. rpi4 for arr stack and nextcloud with a 5TB disk on it. Swiched to everything in a i3 NUC 11 i got for 200eur. Works better, uses less power if you can believe it.
A note about transcoding: I dont know your setup but I never needed it. All video I have is encoded in h264 or HEVC and all my video player devices support these codecs natively. The last time I needed to transcode was 10 years ago when all I had for a media player was a Wii and a movie in HEVC.
This is excellent info thank you.
Honestly servers don’t need to be speced out of oblivion. I use a 10 year old desktop and added a 1TB ssd and it does 99% of what I want it too.
Most important thing for a server is probably the CPU and making sure it has as many cores as possible and maybe hyper threading because you’ll be running a lot if simultaneous services and users.
Get a power measuring device if you don’t have one and consider the real cost of buying something new if you already have something. For instance, I have an older gaming laptop I am considering repurposing for my home automation stuff. While idling it draws about 10w which is amazing to me and a number I never would have guessed. For me that works out to (24 hours * 10w * 365 days* 1000w/Kw ) 87kwh per year. I pay about 10 cents per kwh so say $10 a year. Buying something to save a little power will never work out.
My current home server is an intel NUC from 2013! It can’t do some of the things I would like to add on, but it is a great media server and downloader. Powerful hardware isn’t really a necessity.
As a comparison,
Mine is a 2700X on a B450I with 2 HDDs and 1 NVMe drive at 40W idle. Add an Arc A380 and it idles at 60W. We pay 0.30€ per kWh, so that means to run my server it is 158€ per year without any video transcoding.
Hardware was pretty cheap and it is over-powered, but I pay for it… hopefully getting solar soon!
Oof. I would buy more efficient hardware with those rates too!
Great point thank you
I have a 4 bay Synology and an HP G2 800 i7-6700, plus a POE switch, couple of cameras, omada WAP. The software load is mostly Jellyfin and Syncthing plus a BOINC LXC that pegs one core. Power consumption generally sits at around 55-65W (my APC UPS has a power readout) from memory the idle was pretty low - I think 24W although that might have been the previous 2 bay NAS.
I think your plan of a NUC and a NAS (I’d stick to 2 bay) is a good compromise for low power and easy of setup/management. I have my NAS configured to keep the rust spinning - I’m sure I’d save a bit of power by letting it spin down, but the delay when I starting some media in Jellyfin was annoying, and I suspect the disks will live longer moving anyway.
Thank you. I’m going to start with the nuc, get some stuff running then get the storage down the line.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
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Cool that’ll mitigate the learning curve too, thank you.