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.
Thanks!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
