Hi everyone, Last month I finally managed to build my first SFF PC (Ryzen 7600 + AMD 6800). I’m also starting to learn about self-hosting and tinkering with it (the usual stuff: Jellyfin, pi-hole, nextcloud, VPN, torrenting etc.)
Thing is, of course, a server has to be always on, and I’m having trouble understanding if it can be reasonable to keep it always on or if it’s too pricey and I should invest in a dedicated hardware.
My consideration: a Raspberry Pi seems like it’s not enough powerfull after all. I’ve seen you can come up with an old i5 (4th to 6th gen) minipc with like 100/150 euros, but in not really sure it’s gonna consume much less than my system. What do you suggest? What am I missing?
Thank you :)
Pi should not be the first choice unless you just wanna dip your toe in the water with limited investment or you are real experienced in the trade. While the hardware is powerful enough for many use cases, it is very limited in external connectivity which really hampers its potential as a NAS/multi-purpose server.
CPUs often get less efficient (in the sense of work done per watt) when they are pushed to their limits. Unless you are running the server at full load all the time, the power consumption of a typical x86 system is quite manageable (~30-50W) at idle to low usage. Newer hardware is surely more efficient as newer designs are relatively faster and often have more power conservation technologies built-in.
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This is really up to you, if you have the budget/space for dedicated hardware then you will benefit from it. However, if you are on a budget/space constraints then you could setup some containers in docker either running on the system or in a VM then transfer them over in the future.
A mini PCs sips power when they’re mostly idle, at about 10/15w then it creeps upwards if you push it. It also only needs the iGPU anyway even if you wanna do trancoding on Plex. It will most likely be way more efficient that a desktop with a GPU on it
I think the best choice is getting one of those so all your services are working all the time. A RPI will work albeit you gotta be aware of its limitations.
I started with a Pi 4 8GB. It was not able to keep my RAID 1 (constantly loosing one of the two drives, degraded when added back). Transcoding of movies, also Jellyfin, just not possible. So I bit the bullet and took some old hardware (i7-4790K, 1070, 16GB RAM, PSU, CPU-Cooler) and bought some more used (SFF case, mini-itx board, Bluray-Drive). The case wasn’t the cheapest (56€), because I wanted one with enough room for 5.25" drive and 4 3.5" HDDs. Finding a mini itx board for such an old platform was hard and cost 120€ (I didn’t sell the ATX board I originally used with the CPU, yet). But now it’s a great system, running 19 containers atm In other words, don’t underestimate the cost of old hardware. You may find a cheaper, used prebuilt somewhere
