I dusted off my RPI4 and started tinkering with self-hosting things and it’s sparked a fire. Suddenly I have 7 docker containers running and I need more RAM, more space and I want something reliable with room to grow. I like small form factors but it doesn’t need to be RPI small. Any recs for your favorite hardware under $500?
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I have a couple of Intel NUCs and they are great, one is the first generation NUC with the Celeron and runs Home Assistant without problems.
At the moment I am eyeing the new N100 CPUs they are pretty powerful compared to the previous generation. Asrock and Asus are bringing out motherboards with the CPU soldered and they are also fanless. The Asrock is nicer because you don’t need a real PSU for it and it has an extra SATA port. They are not yet available.
https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100DC-ITX/index.asp
https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/prime/prime-n100i-d-d4/
Planning on making an unRaid miniPC
Intel NUC. Myself I prefer Proxmox as the first layer (so I can do stuff remotelly), and Alpine Linux VM as a second layer.
This been rock stable for me for the past 1 year or so.
This is pretty much exactly what I do. I’m partial to Debian though.
NUCs are great little boxes. I have extensive experience with them. Not a lot of room for RAID or other nice to haves, but besides that even in some pretty bad environments they just happily sit there chugging away year after year.
The fan can get gummed up, but if your environment is at all reasonable it’ll probably not be a problem. OTOH, you can buy these massive fanless cases for a NUC that make the whole question moot.
Wow, first I’m exposed to Proxmox, looks really cool. I’m currently handling remote via Cloudflare Tunnels and it’s working well but I’d love something that will manage multiple servers in the future and this looks like the ticket.
Well, this is not what I meant “remotelly” 😂. I realised I am too lazy to setup monitoring (Telegraf/VictoriaMetrics/Grafana) so I look into VM metrics in proxmox. Also I can reinstall VM remotelly if I fuck things up - very convenient.
Definitely a NUC or similar mini PC from the likes of Geekom, Beelink, or Minisforum. My whole homelab was mini PCs until I consolidated to a NUC 12 Pro as I build up my rack. Slap Proxmox on the machine, build some VMs and LXCs, and have at it.
Or HP/Dell units second hand. Tons of companies ditch those computers after two o three years and they’re still perfectly good for self hosting with Linux. We can also find really good deals on Intel 9th gen machines for around 35% of the price of all those you suggested brand new.
I am still quite happy with my old Sun Fire X2270 M2 with Dual Xeon X5675. Not new, but its 12 physical cores, 88 GB RAM and 4 hotswap SATA drive bays in a 1U rack unit make it quite a decent machine for running a couple of VMs.
I also like my Dell T320 Rackable Tower server. It has room for 8 hotswap 3.5" SAS drives (or 16 2.5"), redundant power supply, and you should be able to get it for under $300. With a Xeon E5-1428L V2, mine is still quite capable and uses between 140 and 160 W (with 8 disks).
Wow, that’s a ton of computing power for the money.
I have some (refurbished) HP mini PCs that are pretty decent, you can probably find similar things well within that range. You could also consider an off-lease/used server in that price range, but will have to do some hunting to find something you like. Also, servers can be a bit loud and power hungry (the efficiency of the compute is lower than e.g. a mini PC or a Pi, but it will have way more compute. Servers with something like dual hex core CPUs and 64+ GB of RAM are not uncommon).
I run both mini PCs and server hardware, using the server hardware mainly for storage or services that need quite high availability (auth, reverse proxy, password vault) and the mini PCs for most everything else (minecraft servers, wiki, jellyfin, etc)
HP EliteDesk 800 G3 go for about 110€ on eBay in my area so they should have similar pricing in the US. Bought three of them and upgraded each one to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of NVME storage. They’re near silent and draw very little power which is perfect for me. I’ve set them up as a Proxmox cluster to host a bunch of VMs for messing around. I wouldn’t recommend them for applications that do video encoding though. Plex for example can bring one of these machines to its knees when you’re dealing with very large 4K Blu-ray rips like I am. In that case I usually just run Plex on my desktop when I need to.
HP EliteDesk 800 G3
Yep. I use one of these for all of my homelab stuff. The i5 7500 does everything I need it to do, including h265 QuickSync transcoding for Plex & tDarr.
Do you have the Mini one or the regular one? Because the fan in my Mini is kinda annoying even on low speeds. Now I wonder if it’s normal or if it’s broken somehow.
Sorry for the late reply, notifications weren’t working properly in my app.
Yes, I mean the Mini not the full-size desktop.
Depends who you talk to and what their objectives are. I leaned heavier on homelab side than homeserver side so I use older rack mount server, but if you’re just interested in running some services at home, nothing wrong with NUCs or desktops. Most can get you over the 32-64GB of RAM level now that you’d have ample room for activity.
I used to run a Dell R710, but that got expensive with the electricity prices shooting up. So I moved to a standard consumer hardware PC in a rack mount case. Ryzen 5 5600, 64GB RAM, 500GB NVME, SSD boot disk, 6x 3.5" disks for storage. It uses half the power and is a fair bit quicker than the old dell with dual X5670 Xeons. One day I’ll move to just 2x larger disks instead of 6, but that’s expensive at the moment.
I just built a Server using J5040 board. With 16gb ram (yes it works) a 500gb m.2 as system , 2x4tb ironwolf, all in the node 304 fractal case for 550 euro.
Will run proxmox as first layer.
At the moment hardware is just expensive. I ended up with a NUC with 32gb of ram in order to future proof myself while I wait for hardware to become cheaper. Other than another stick of ram I can’t see me needing to update any time soon.
I like synology NAS units with Intel chips for hosting docker containers, alongside lots of network storage. They aren’t the cheapest solution but they are robust devices and i have had basically no problems since setting mine up in 2019.
Of course you can get a used dell server blade for a lot less which will be more powerful but it doesnt meet your small form factor requirement.
I use a Dell Micro with Ubuntu for docker containers mounted to a wall with a Synology NAS 4 bay for storage. I used to have a small form factor with a 12bay SAS array attached but the power consumption was ridiculous.
any Intel 8 series or higher. can do hardware Plex transcoding and anything else you need
Refurbished thin clients usually work great and have great value.
Keeping storage and compute separately is the best practice but if you’re OK with combining both in one device then running docker-compose on a Synology (via SSH, + versions only) works just fine. An alternative that reduces the lock-in at the expense of more tinkering is buying an amd64 QNAP and installing Openmediavault / TrueNAS / plain Debian.
Intel NUC or similar mini-pcs. $500 can get you a pretty decent performant machine with ample memory. Extensibility can be an issue as the small form factor obviously does not allow much room for storage and expansion. Usually they only comes with 1 or 2 PCIe x4 M.2 slots. Some may provide you an extra SATA. If you want to be futureproof and you want to leave the machine as-is, you had better spot a machine with Thunderbolt 3/USB4 connectivity.
