I’ve been eyeing these devices for some time now. The price point is… delicious!
I saw some opensource-ish project one day that mentioned that they are building an OS around Plex and other media servers and using these N5105s and selling the package for USD500ish (I think).
So I went hunting for the hardware and found it on Aliexpress for that cheap (sub USD200).
Does anyone have experience running these? How hard is it to get Ubuntu running on them? I dislike that they ship with Windows 11. Would be a few bucks cheaper if they shipped with Ubuntu or no OS, right?
Also, what about running docker on them? Can they support your usual homelab stuff? Portainer, Pi-hole, *arr softwares, a dashboard, etc.
I bought a N5100 from AliExpress and I use it to run my -arr apps and Plex, and so far it has behaved really good. It’s fanless in an all-metal case and it gets a bit hot, but nothing you wouldn’t put your hand over. Weirdly, before I installed Debian in it, the BIOS and UEFI console made the CPU so hot I was worried it would not work without a fan, but after the OS took over, it’s working without any issue. I installed 16gb of ram in it and two SSDs, and the power consumption is so low I’m really amazed.
Edit: I might add, I bought it barebones, so I missed the W11 license, but I was never planning to use it anyway.
I just picked up a similar one that i’ll use as a router. They work just like any normal hardware, you can do pretty much anything you’d want on them. Also they definitely are not paying for windows licenses, so they probably wouldn’t be any cheaper without.
I run Plex on essentially one of these (different case, but n5105/8gb ram, bought from AliExpress) and they’re great little machines for it. Most of my library is 1080p, but I have run 2 simultaneous 4k transcodes before and it just keeps chugging along happily. I’m actually running proxmox on it, with Plex being just one container out of several, so it also has the grunt to do several simultainious streams and keep my mastodon server, torrent box, pihole, and a few other things running at the same time. In my experience, you’ll run out of ram before ever chocking the CPU on a standard setup, so it might be worth upping to the n100 to get 16gs instead.
It wouldn’t be any cheaper for them to ship without windows, because the windows os youre getting from aliexpress sellers selling budget pcs is almost always counterfeit :p but installing Linux on them is a breeze, they’ve got a full standard uefi BIOS, so just plug a USB stick with Ubuntu on it in, and install as usual.
damn! Thanks for the LD. Did not expect you to say the Win will be fake :D But good to know about the RAM situation. I mentioned this elsewhere that the 5105 seems to do better GPU than the N100. So if some other seller has a 5105 with 16 GB RAM, I’ll go for that instead. Man I wanna play with proxmox. Just never had an idle machine to do that. Maybe this will be it.
Getting proxmox to pass the GPU through to containers is a little fiddly, but it got a lot easier since they moved to the 6.x kernel, and there’s plenty of guides around. It could well be worth a look if you want to run multiple servers on one device
As for the GPU, they’re unlikely to make a huge difference either way, but note that the n5105 has no hardware support for the AV1 codec, so any media you have or end up with in that format will need decoding on the CPU. The n100 igpu has hardware decode instead, so if you think you might end up with any av1 content, then that’s the way to go.
How about proxmox running GitHub runners? Maybe it can run a few containers, each running an independent GitHub runner which can pick up different tasks in parallel?
AV1 content… I don’t think I have need for it. But maybe I’m wrong? I have an Apple TV and iOS devices running Plex apps. Do those need AV1 now?
wish these companies making soft routers would give a couple options with a nas case instead. 4 bay n5105 or n100 for cheap would be a nice low power side grade to my old e3,
Yeah. There are a lot of them, all pretty good. servethehome has done reviews for many- N100 version
If they removed all but one 2.5gbe port, it might not even be any more expensive to give 4 sata and a case.
I use a similar one of these (different io panel and case) for OPNSense and it’s been a delight. Not sure how well it would handle Plex but if you don’t need to transcode the files it should be fine. I bought one without ram, os, and storage for $150 last year. That listing isn’t available anymore.
