Pretty much what the title says, I was wondering, since I want to invest on self hosting applications and my raspberry pi 3 b+ can barely function. I don’t have enormous expectations, just docker containers, nextcloud, pihosted, jellyfin… Any further suggestions (regarding the hardware) will be much appreciated.
Intel NUCs are known for that purpose, a lot of plex builds are based on the iGPU
I hit the limit of my Raspberry Pi 4. It would periodically crash itself by overheating (Heatsink was hot to the touch) I now use a NUC. It runs excellently, and handles my home automation setup fine. Unless I start doing something extreme, I can see myself overloading it.
One of the less mentioned things with self hosting is running costs. A Pi is extremely cheap to run. A NUC is a bit more, but still well below a full blown PC. Servers can actually pull a significant load, even when idle.
Thanks for mentioning running costs, I was curious about that. How much more do you think the NUC is costing you compared to a Pi?
Not op, but a nuc idles around 5 watts, and at load can use up to 100 watts depending on specs. A raspberry pi4 idles somewhere around 3.5 watts and at load is still under 10 watts.
From memory, I think it worked out 50-80% more power draw, on average. I might be wrong on that however, I’ve yet to do a will watt measurement with like for like loads. My testing was closer to both idling.
The NUC can draw more power, but has far more advanced power saving features too. I ended up budgeting using 20W.
You may get more bang for your buck by getting a comparable mini PC rather than a NUC. Some ThinkCentre Tiny machines are listed on eBay for less than $100 USD. HP and other manufacturers sell their own versions as well.
ThinkCentre Tiny machine
Or dell optiplex for a bargain.
Got myself a Dell 8gen 8GB 256GB SSD for 40€… Got a 6 core (8500?, It came with a “Pentium Gold” bi core) for 60€ and a 4TB HD for 70€… For example. I think it will handle a lot before needing an upgrade. It’s a smallish tower though, but sff versions exist too.
It’s as crazy how cheap those PCs are and how expensive Raspberries has become :-/
It’s as crazy how cheap those PCs are and how expensive Raspberries has become :-/
On the former, it’s because these are mostly models sold en masse after company upgrades. Often marked as “refurbished” although I suspect it’s just basic checks. Regarding the Pi, seems to be supply issues; they should at least start being sold at retail price again this year from what I hear, not that it’s necessarily worth it.
I agree, but what about power usage?
Yeah sure, it’s not the same.
I am running almost everything in my home on a NUC (Celeron J3455 1.5GHz with 8GB RAM) and it doesn’t break a sweat.
Running invidious, nextcloud, kavita, airsonic, n8n, audiobookshelf, freshrss, calibre-web, vaultwarden, nginx proxy manager
They provide the best balance for efficiency. Not too powerful enough to be a workhorse and not to weak to run multiple simple applications/services. NUCs are great in that they come with hardware video acceleration tech that’s highly optimized for media transcoding.
Very similar, but usually dramatically cheaper… Look into the Lenovo Tiny line of PCs, you can get a used model with a surprising amount of power for a lot less than you’d see in a comparable NUC and in my experience, they’re usually hardier machines.
If you’re buying and want it cheap this is 100% the way to go. I got an M900 to go with my NUC and it only cost $60 for one with an i7 vs $200 for a similar NUC
I have a 2015 NUC I use as my server with next cloud, immich, jellyfin, gitlab and more. Mostly, I wish I put more ram in and could have two internal drives, but otherwise I love the form factor.
i3 are good enough for the things I wrote or should I got for i5/i7?
depends on how many services you plan on running, i think the i3 would be sufficient for what you listed, the i5 would give you room to grow.
the i7’s usually aren’t worth it for servers since they are just a clock speed increase.
Celeron would handle that (see my other reply)
In general, I’d say it’s good enough. i5 might have more cores if you need them, but then i7 only gets you slightly higher frequency, which may not be worth the price.
Definitely! I’ve used them for years and they are super convenient. Especially in small space living. I have a small server setup in a closet that is a direct attached raid array with an m1 Mac and an Intel nuc on top.
In general I prefer the max because it can do a lot with very minimal heat generation but using a Mac mini as a server has a few downsides that you won’t run into with a nuc. Things like arm vs x86, no way to run the OS headless, cost, etc…
I’m running all my microservices on a couple of repurposed NUC5i5RYKs, running Ubuntu Server 22.04 (I know I know) and Docker. They’ve been absolutely rock steady thus far, though not quite as overkill as I like all my computers to be. But I got them in 2015 and they’ve held up more than admirably.