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.
Used to run on a pi 4 but moved to a 11th Gen NUC and wouldnāt go back. Well, the pi was nice when I didnāt have any money but the performance boost of just an i3 is hard to beat. With headless debian 13, the nuc now draws 5w idle. Seriously low consumption, costs like 10eur in electric energy per year. Pi 4 still found a home for homeassistant +zigbee stack.
Damn right. As much as I love my Pis, they have minimal headroom for what Iām looking at doing. This upgrade is great esp with the ability to consolidate all my stuff into one unit. As for power use, the lower the better as Iām guessing the setup will be idling majority of the time, and āvampire powerā still sits in the back of my brain. In another comment I placed anything below 50w as a good limit.
As for my Pi4, Iām looking at possibly gifting to a friend as their primary devices donāt handle x265 at all, but I have plenty of options to repurpose both it and even the Pi3. I do need to look into Zigbee stuff though. Still an alien term to me lol.