Would you recommend to use a RPi 5 or a second hand Lenovo mini pc (i3 6100t, 8gb ram) or something else?
Raspberry pi: No. Or, at least, not without doing something to make sure you have a real storage backend and aren’t just running it off an SD card. The wear on SD cards is exaggerated and largely minimized if you use an OS that is configured to be aware of it but you are also increasingly relying on a ticking time bomb.
Mini PC/NUC? I am a huge fan of these and think they are what most people actually need for stuff like home assistant, adguard, etc. Just understand you are going to be storage limited sooner than you expect and you can oversubscribe that CPU and memory a lot faster than you would expect.
My general suggestion? Install proxmox on the mini PC and deploy on top of that. If/when you decide you want something more, migration is usually pretty easy.
And if you just want a NAS? It is really hard to go wrong with a 4 bay NAS from one of the reputable vendors (which may just be ugreen at this point?) as those tend to still come out cheaper than building it yourself and 4 disks means you can either play with fire with RAID5 or not be stupid and do RAID1.
Oh yeah, that is true. Mini PC has a proper ssd nvme.
Thanks for the feedback! Will look at the NAS you recommend, but i thik i want more freedom to tinker. Will definitely look into proxmox!
Just get a used PC and make a NAS. No need to buy a premade on.
For a (first) NAS, I generally discourage this.
Office liquidation desktops are great for home servers (if you aren’t paying for power). But they generally are very limited on storage. Limited bays to install hard drives and limited SATA ports. So you rapidly end up with drives just sitting on the bottom of the case and real jank pcie boards to extend your storage.
Which then becomes a HUGE issue when you have a drive failure. Because now you need to actually identify which drive is the failed one which involves reading off serial numbers and so forth.
Whereas a 4-bay NAS generally has dedicated hardware and hot swap bays which make this trivial. You might never actually use the hot swap capability, but it makes checking which drive is the bad drive fairly trivial.
Also, a good 4 bay NAS is REAL easy to unplug and put in the trunk of your car during a disaster. Don’t ask me how I know.
I don’t have direct experience with them, but my understanding from youtubes is that the ugreen NASes are specifically designed for you to just ignore their OS and install your own (so truenas or proxmox).
Hardware tinkering is more limited but… there is very much a question of how much of that people actually do.
Mini PC. Beelinks with the N100 chip are absolute beasts at doing video encoding at low power.
I also recommend Beelink. I’ve been running an eqr6 (ryzen) for almost a year and it’s been awesome.
The Mini PC would be a lot easier. The RPi needs things to be built for ARM, and not everything is. The RPi is also slower and isn’t repairable.
RPis are great for many things, but generic home servers aren’t one of them, unless you really need clustering for some reason (like, a Ceph cluster).
I built a home server based on an Intel N100 motherboard a while ago. I’ve put proxmox on it and run my Home Assistant installation, Nextcloud, several other stuff and even my router as an OpenWRT VM!
I chose to go the N100 motherboard route mainly due to the flexibility it offers. But you can just buy a N100 based NUC and you get effectively the same performance and incredible low power consumption.
I would recommend against the Pi 5. It is way underpowered in my opinion. Plus with a x86 system you just have a lot more software compatibility.
Similarly here. Have an Odroid with that platform, it wasn’t cheap but it came with several advantages:
- 4 SATA ports on addition to the M2 slot
- Intel QSV
- 2 x 2.5 Gbit Ethernet (I only have gigabit at home though)
Very powerful machine for the power usage, I ran a really old Athlon before though (from 2010 or so that I retrofitted with 16GB RAM) that did most stuff just fine. But I wanted some transcoding and also possibly a smaller case.
I run everything bare metal though.
I would avoid a Raspi/ARM at all costs. But there is a third alternative: A x86 SBC like a Zima Board or blade might be exactly what you are looking for. Small, powerful enough and far easier than an ARM to maintain.
I bought a generic N150 based minipc for a firewall & router (running OPNsense), and repurposed an old desktop PC as a server to host immich, paperless, nextcloud, etc… I considered both RPi and mini pc for the server, but I needed a few TB of storage and wanted redundancy. Spinny disks were a much more affordable option than SSDs, and minipcs and Rpis tend to not have much space for those drives. You can add on storage to them, but then they just become clunkier and more expensive than the old PC I already had laying around. Power consumption is probably a few watts higher on the PC than a Pi would be, but it’s not terrible.
That’s why I went the direction I did. I’m 3 about or 4 months in, and it’s been solid so far.
I use a retired business laptop. 16GB RAM and Linux, mapped some shares from my NAS. Low power high performance.
I just repurposed one of our older PCs for that task. Slap Ubuntu on it, install webmin, and you’re set up.
I’ve have amazing luck with both Beelink and Minisforum computers. They’re relatively cheap and excellent quality.
I personally use the Beelink ME Mini and it’s been able to handle just fine about any server tasks I need it to, not to mention the wildly expandable storage.
Beelink ME Mini
Would something like this be suitable as a NAS + Jellyfin + Home Assistant box?
That is exactly what I use mine for and it does it pretty much silently.
Is it going to be a general purpose file server? A media server through jellyfin, etc.? If a media server, do you need to transcode?
NAS, perhaps apps like vaultwarden, nextcloud, immich, maybe grafana for sensors… I am not 100% sure as this would be the first.
If power consumption isn’t a huge deal, then an Intel-based Mini PC. This will allow you to do transcoding for streaming as well as any other more CPU-intensive task. It also gives you stellar USB 5Gb support which can be used for quite a large storage pool. I’m running a 5x 16TB ZFS pool on an Intel-based Lenovo mini PC. It’s in a multi-bay USB box. Unfortunately AMD’s pre-Zen 5 USB controllers aren’t reliable for this use case which is why I recommend Intel. Pre-Zen 5 AMD-based mini PCs might be OK with one disk per USB port, but as soon as you peg a USB port to its limit, you start running into USB resets.
If you want something more capable that will handle more experimentation, go for the mini PC. If you know exactly what you want to host and you want to prioritize low power consumption, the pi might be a better choice.
depends on what you want it to do.
I’m running a home space with jellyfin and navidrome on a Pi5. Until now it’s been perfectly fine playing local and normally streaming to a single device at a time. The online support and off the shelf peripheries for troubleshooting the pi is also great!
I went to plug a 5TB drive into the pi the other day and it unmounted the SSD that was already plugged in. To me this is a sign that it is not build to handle more rigorous tasks (e.g. streaming to multiple devices, whilat performing a back up).
I probably won’t be swapping the system anytime soon, but I would go for a refurbed mini PC if I could go back in time.
Thanks for the feedback! Had similar problems with a raspberry pi. It cannot deliver enough power to the hdd, so it kept rebooting the drive.
Raspberry Pi 5 exists?
Oh neat! https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/
For two years, yes.