Hey all, lurker for a bit, but just joined because I’ve started my journey of self hosting the simple stuff (or at least I hope it’s simple). For the past couple years I’ve been using a RPi Zero W for PiHole, and more recently go into Jellyfin and Home Assistant, using an RPi4 and an RPi3+ respectively. I’ve also got a hand-me-down Synology ds214j NAS with 2x8TB in RAID0 RAID1, which is about half full atm. I’m not expecting to expand that storage anytime soon, so I’ve pivoted to an attempt at combining the 3 Pis above into one NUC/SFF/etc device with a roughly similar power draw. Also looking at re-jumping back into 3D printing using OctoPrint.
I’ve looked briefly at jumping to a Pi5, but that led me down the rabbit hole with Jeff Geerling’s article/video on Pi vs. NUC. I’ve continued to putter around looking at NUCs in the ~$200 range. Hoping to stick with MinisForum, GMKTek, or Beelink if possible, but only because… it’s all I know. I’d like to also tinker deeper with Linux flavors, as I’m a noob at best with it but want to at least have some growing knowledge, as I’ve primarily been a Windows gamer and use Apple at the office almost exclusively. I’d like to try staying with AMD as I’ve slowly moved over from the “dark side” (don’t hurt me) that is Intel and Nvidia.
Last nugget is that I’ve never tinkered with Docker, as it seems that may be the best route to host all these apps on one contiguous installation. I’ve new-ish to VMs too, so anything “Baby’s First VM” would be nice.
I know I made a giant pile of wants/needs, so if there’s no magical unicorn, I’m cool with other ideas. Thanks in advance, and I’m really keen on seeing what options I have.
I got an old Lenovo P330 Xeon with 64 G of ECC ram. I recently checked its power usage for another poster asking the same thing. I was shocked to see it only use 15Watts while streaming 4k hevc.
For server use, ECC is important because it’s going to be on 24/7 for years at a time.
For business, ECC is definitely required. I really don’t see it needed for home use.
I’ve never run it for home boxes - I’ve had a Windows domain at home since the 90’s using desktop hardware and it’s as stable as any SMB I’ve seen running on enterprise-grade hardware.
I switched to ECC only for my home server over 10 years ago after a silent ram error corrupted some data on my raid drives. I didn’t realize there was a problem until I went to look at an old photo and it was corrupted.
“8 percent of the DIMMs saw correctable error per year”
And this was from 20 years ago when memory density was much less so the chance of an error was lower.
https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
@Blue_Morpho @Onomatopoeia Hm, is that something that snapraid scrub would theoretically catch? I’m thinking probably not, as the corruption would likely happen when initially writing the files, rather than after the files have been sitting around on disk for a while.
Oh wow. Yeah, I have an old server hand-me-down from a friend, and his first red flag with it was it was gonna pull down $50 more power monthly 0_o. I may look into this. I have a few old cases lying about, but I was looking from in the super small form factor as I could nestle it in my network cabinet.
It depends on how old. My Xeons are e-2224G. They’re 14nm coffee lake. They are rated at 71Watts but as I said only use 15w streaming 4k.
They’re $190 on eBay with 16gb ram and 256 GB SSD.
A 16 GB Pi5 is $130 just for the motherboard. You still need storage, case and power supply.
Perhaps not the size you’re after, but I have a HP Z1 G5, i9-9900, 5 SSD, 3 HDD, and that can idle as low as 45W and costs me £60/yr in electric. I managed to pick it up off eBay for only £260 (discounted from £350; if you keep an eye on certain things, sellers drop prices to rid of their gear).
Yeah, definitely beyond my needs. I actually have a hand-me-down server a friend gifted me, and that is well beyond what I need, plus power costs in the $50+/mo realm. Certainly not a bad price for that type of performance. Sure, it would be cool to have a centralized system that can do everything, but outside of my initial thoughts of using this setup for 4-5 low-power things, the cost is too great to consider. Thanks for your input nonetheless!