EDIT: Holy shit, was not expecting so much support for my inquiry. Thank you all for the bevy of ideas and solutions. I think Iām still gonna go for the Intel 12th Gen+ NUC style, although some of your setups seriously made me quite jelly. Maybe Iāll get there one of these days. Iāll update this when I finally lock down my purchase :)
Hey all, lurker for a bit, but just joined because Iāve started my journey of self hosting the simple stuff (or at least I hope itās simple). For the past couple years Iāve been using a RPi Zero W for PiHole, and more recently go into Jellyfin and Home Assistant, using an RPi4 and an RPi3+ respectively. Iāve also got a hand-me-down Synology ds214j NAS with 2x8TB in RAID0 RAID1, which is about half full atm. Iām not expecting to expand that storage anytime soon, so Iāve 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.
Iāve looked briefly at jumping to a Pi5, but that led me down the rabbit hole with Jeff Geerlingās article/video on Pi vs. NUC. Iāve continued to putter around looking at NUCs in the ~$200 range. Hoping to stick with MinisForum, GMKTek, or Beelink if possible, but only becauseā¦ itās all I know. Iād like to also tinker deeper with Linux flavors, as Iām a noob at best with it but want to at least have some growing knowledge, as Iāve primarily been a Windows gamer and use Apple at the office almost exclusively. Iād like to try staying with AMD as Iāve slowly moved over from the ādark sideā (donāt hurt me) that is Intel and Nvidia.
Last nugget is that Iāve never tinkered with Docker, as it seems that may be the best route to host all these apps on one contiguous installation. Iāve new-ish to VMs too, so anything āBabyās First VMā would be nice.
I know I made a giant pile of wants/needs, so if thereās no magical unicorn, Iām cool with other ideas. Thanks in advance, and Iām really keen on seeing what options I have.
tldr: A used x86 desktop is better than a pi
Iāve never understood why so many people self-host on pis. If itās at home and not on a sailboat or drone, donāt worry about the power consumption. Worry about having enough power for a smooth operation.
Like imagine your jellyfin skips during videos. Now you have to chase down the bottleneck and when you do, probably canāt upgrade the hardware anyway.
Plus if the project doesnt have an ARM binary or container, you have to create a compilation workflow.
Hospitals and schools upgrade their hardware every five years or so (when windows starts to slow down). The x86 workstations go up for auction for cheap. I buy them direct at govdeals.com (usa) where they usually sell in lots. If you just need one, look on ebay where the units are typically resold. Either way you can find something decent for $50-$100.
So buy an x86. It will live forever and you can use your pi in a weather station or drone or similar project where size and power consumption matter.
In my own setup, I have jellyfin on one $50 workstation and homeassistant/frigate on another. I would not have space (resources) for both on one machine because frigate is doing object detection on six cameras (even with a hardware detector). So the homeassistant computer has that NPU and zigbee dongle and a big hard drive for the recordings. In the Jellyfin machine, I put a 12tb hdd for the media and graphics card that is really good at transcoding (I travel a lot and stream videos from home).
I do have a few old desktops I could work with, but my goal here is to find the golden ratio or whatever of hosting a bunch of small things all in one unit without going overboard, and ultimately shoving it all into the networking cabinet I posted in another comment. Low power, low footprint, etc. But who knows? Maybe one day Iāll jump to something like your setup. Thanks for the input!