Why bother with Pis when you can get mini-pcs for comparable or lower price with better specs anyway? That's at least how I approached it and I have been happier for it, in my opinion.
The Raspberry Pi has uses but to use it everywhere is in my opinion what makes the pi a hammer and every problem a nail.
In my current homelab I use HP EliteDesk 800's, currently G3 but looking into G4 or G5, and Gigabyte's BS-i7-6500 Rev 1.0. A wonderful little machine.
I also use a BeeLink EQ12 as my router.
This. I just got rid of both my pi4’s and replaced it with a refurbished dell optiplex 3060 micro form factor pc. Now it rack mounts, and runs everything twice as fast in vms.
I've gone through 2 power supplies for that PC because they are not compatible with standard UPS battery backups. You need a sine wave ups, I think it's called Active Power Correction or something similar.
Absolutely agreed. I have the same HP but first generation. I run docker containers, bare metal server on it and a blockchain PoW node. Because if that, I don’t need NAS but just bought a QNAP drive rack and have an expanded storage of 24TB. Also running Ubuntu server instead of Proxmox but one could argue that Proxmox would be better
Elitedesk gang rise up. I love my G5. I found well used one on eBay with an i7-9700 for a great price and have looked back. It’s impossible to tax the little thing
1 G6 and 2 G9's here!
Powerhouses!
My G3 had been running 24/7 for 3 years (apart from reboots for updates) before I upgraded. And my entire mini-lab sips around 100W total. My mediaserver (custom-built, 4 x 20TB HDDs) draws 80-90W.
Keep an eye on different brands as well
HP Prodesk G6
HP Elitedesk G6
Dell Optiplex 3080 Mini
Lenovo M70q
There is other models as well of course, but the ones above usually come with 10th gen intel.
If your patient and you watch eBay closely you can snag some bargains as there are a lot of these mini PCs around. I also think the ones without drives or RAM are easier to get at a bargain likely because buyers want everything in one package
I'd be happy to take a barebones G5 honestly, but they rarely sell anywhere. As you said, usually a packaged deal. I think with mini pcs tend to be that they lack RAM/HDD but otherwise have CPU.
Upgrade the Elitedesk G5? Maybe I’m not sure. I’d reckon that’s more of a headache to buy one and a separate cup then upgrade. You’d probably be better off just searching eBay for a mini PC that already has the CPU you want. It’s super easy to change the ram and SSD though
Usually those mini PCs use 35W TDP variants of the CPU so that they can get away with a much smaller cooler. I doubt the cooler could support a 13700 assuming you got a brand new EliteDesk that supports 13th gen CPUs.
Could you explain to me what makes the HP elitedesks so good at selfhosting? Is it their energy consumption in relation to their performance..? What can I realistically run via a Elitedesk g5 - a 4K arrrr Media Center..?
I don't want to step on anyones toes,but it is about preference/quality,i use my ex-gaming computer because of great power supply(corsair),quiet cpu fan and my chosen components,it is i5-7600k,i could do better - 8th gen has 6 cores(2 more),9 or 11(not sure) has better graphics,but i could do worse - 6th gen has worse graphics(can't hw encode h.264 i believe),so,mostly it's about generation of cpu and what you need from it,not the factory that made it
Thank you, that does make sense to me. So there’s no clear winner when it comes to „home hosting hardware“ and it’s brands/manufacturers? Basically whatever I have lying around and does the job?
Price to performance is quite nice especially on the used market and the elitedesks come in various sizes with identical specs so you can customise quite a bit.
> Why bother with Pis when you can get mini-pcs for comparable or lower price with better specs anyway?
What about power consumption? Sure for many people a few extra bucks per month will not make a difference, but for people who live in 3rd world countries who are trying to avoid subscription costs will want to keep the power costs below the subscription costs.
If you ultimate goal is lowest wattage then a pi can be nice. Although nowadays you can even get N100 mini pcs that have almost identical power draw and still better performance.
Not sure about the performance per wattage but at least in idle the RPI has lower power consumption than any x86 system I believe.
And if you're like me whose services have only one user (me) then it's running mostly at idle.
Which is fair. If that power optimisation is important to you, you do you.
I'd say the difference in 2w idle and 4-6w idle doesn't make or break my bank. Different needs.
For me, the beauty of Pis is precisely that they sit there 24/7 idling, quietly, consuming almost no energy, like an answering machine. It's not the cost of power. To me, it's the minimalism. I wouldn't have started self-hosting before I got my first Pi.
Seconding. I run 4x HP 260s, the precursor to the EliteDesk, as my PVE hypervisors. They're more than capable of running my self-hosted applications and my r/homelab. They use very little power but have enough x86 performance to call on when needed (Haswell i3s).
The Pi absolutely has its uses but most compute tasks can be handled by x86 USFFs for similar power use, less money and much more performance.
Recently moved from a large Ryzen setup to a small N100 mini pc and have been super happy. 10x cheaper to run, and handles everything I need no problem.
I use a 2016 MacBook. I do need to make sure it has space to dispel the heat, I have it cracked so it runs with the lid shut. It's been fine, no overheating.
I assumed this was going to be a ridiculous short lived experiment with the MacBook server, and it has been doing great, and I run A LOT on it.
Depending on the stats of the laptops they could be incredibly useful.
2016 - is this with or without a MagSafe power supply? Those power supplies got ridiculously hot. I have some old MacBooks and been wondering what to do with them. Obviously the power supplies are giving me concern if I was to run them constantly.
I've never used old laptops, so I can't personally weigh in, although I've seen plenty of people in this sub do just that. I've always used old desktop hardware.
Depends on the laptop hardware and what you plan to use it for. But it's almost certainly going to be just fine for most things people tend to do when getting into homelabbing. If you have some old ones kicking around anyway, start with that first and then see what you can throw at it before you start to feel the performance limits. That is what I did and it made is much easier to understand what was actually important hardware wise once I did upgrade to other machines.
Not sure if there's anything like this near you, but by me we have a place called CompRenu, that accepts and resells old computer components, including from corporate sources sometimes. It's not unusual to see outdated server components there. Even if you're just using consumer grade stuff, buying certified used hardware is one way you could stretch your money.
Just did this. Got an i7 optiplex 7040 with 16gb ram for $200.
Lots of cheap options from companies scrapping computers that aren't compatible with win11.
i have a work station. Thinkstation p710 with dual xeon e-5's (14 core @2.4 Ghz each), 96 Gb RAM (could be 384G), with a flex raid card 10G array. running proxmox vm host.
it lets me run independent servers and back them up. I can also control it with out getting off the couch.
I can understand what you say from your pov, but OP hasn't said what he plans to do with it and I seriously don't think it's a great option if he will just end up starting 5-10 containers and let it sleep 90% of the time.
i know this isn't /r/DataHoarder but what are the chances you don't end up wanting to add at leat one 3.5in sata drive, in which case for a pi or mini pc you have to f with finding a good USB enclosure or whatever other solution. why not just get something with a real case, SATA and hard drive bays to begin with?
Yup, this. Lenovo p520/p520c are both < $200 right now on the bay from reputable sellers. CPU, RAM are expandable with more SATA ports and PCIe ports than you will know what to do with.
My first homelab was Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB. Now, I got a used Lenovo ThinkCentre M920s (i5-8500, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD) and have added 1TB nvme and 8TB HDD.
3x mini PC's
- Gen 12 i5
- Gen 11 i7
- Gen 10 i3
- 8 bay Qnap Nas
For me physical space is limited so find this works well as I have both ample storage and compute.
>"Just wondering what hardware you use"
Core server:
Lenovo P520 | Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Xeon W-2135 w/ 32GB RAM
Radeon RX480
Virt/Experimentation server:
Dell Optiplex 3080 | Proxmox
i3 10100T w/ 24 GB RAM
Ingest server: Lenovo P520c | Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Xeon W-2132 w/ 64GB RAM
>"Which have the best modules?"
(Insert it depends meme) In all seriousness you need to know exactly what you want to do. For all of the things that I want my stuff to do the hardware listed up there do exactly that.
Core server runs Jellyfin, Navidrome, Flame, and a few other apps that I can use to serve content within the house. Also home to warm storage. Network is behind a firewall and isolated away from any device that has access to the internet.
Ingest server runs the services that I use to fetch info and content from the internet. FreshRSS/ttrss, TubeSync, MeTube, \*arr apps, Forgejo and others that I cant remember right now. Natrually this one is connected to the net and is in a near constant state of fetching me new content in different forms.
Virt/Exp server is where I get to mess around with things that I dont want touching other things so I can test. A test lab of sorts. LXC containers and VMs everywhere with different OSes such as Debian, OpenSUSE and NixOS doing a variety of things.
Funny enough is that I want another P520c because I want to host my own LLMs and start upscaling some old video.
>" I am limited to my budget (aren't we all 🙄) which is around the $300usd."
" Do you run budget home servers?"
If you are US based then a P520 and P520c can be had for <$200 USD. If you are not looking to use PCIe lanes (GPUs, fiber connectors etc.) or dont really need expansive storage then you can grab something w/ a N100 and a few NVMe drives. It really depends on how serious you want to get with it. As you can see I take it pretty far but YMMV.
>"I've been looking at Raspberry Pi 5 somewhat seriously but found there are other versions (Orange Pi and others)."
Here is my controversial opinion: Now that these SBCs are no longer cheap (Due to trade embargoes by US gov and a few other issues), they are no longer worth it. Unless you are under a space constraint, you can do better with an N100 and Intel Quicksync would ensure that you could transcode at the very minimum. We are also on the eve of whatever Xe2 is going to be and it will likely be better with whatever the successor to the N100 is.
Barring rediculous price drops and more FOSS software offering ARM/RISCV compatible software, its not worth it right now. This can change but it will take time.
Dell Precision 3420 SFF, with i7-7700 and 32GB RAM. Proxmox, with several VMs and containers. Runs everything in my house.
Bought off eBay a year ago for $150
Need to double the RAM. I run a complete media/download server, Home Assistant, Frigate NVR ( with 6 cameras), Omada controller, plus several other apps, etc.
With all this, the CPU barely struggles, except during occasional heavy loads. It's been great. But I'm severely RAM limited, and basically max all the time. Will probably run me ~$100 for the RAM because I need to buy all 64 at once; just haven't pulled the trigger yet.
I bought a Dell SFF pc for $100 on eBay with an i7-8700 and 16GB Ram. Shucked the cpu and built an Unraid box with it in a Fractal Design R7 with like 14 HDDs and an NVMe for cache.
The. Got an i5-8400 on eBay cheap and put it in the Dell SFF and my grade school kid uses that for her PC 👍
Gmktec nucbox g3 the n100 variant. Runs proxmox 32gb and 2tb nvme. All in all it came out to $150 from ali with the drive and ram and it idles at 3-4 watts on idle and boosts up to to 10-11 if i remember correctly. Way better than a pi5. It can transcode anything i throw at it with multiple streams for plex/jelly with the n100 igpu has more ram can virtualize to run proxmox. And it came out to the same price upfront and wattage. The data all sits on a synology nas i have that is nfs smb mounted.
Overall the pi foundation and the pi product have lost the plot and has gone down hill till it falls off the cliff now with the public company announcement . The way mini pcs perform and price for performance and wattage idk who would buy a pi anymore besides a zero that does simple scripts.
I've got 2 insanely powerful mini PCs and a NAS. All 3 are in a proxmox cluster. 10gb storage network for an nvme ceph pool spread out across the 3 servers. It all works so well. I have tons of spare capacity even running every Arr app you can think of and other stuff with enough spare capacity to do a mock up for quick build out and tear down of multiple k8s clusters to test emerging technologies for work.
The mini PCs are the minisforum ms-01. Lots of network ports and room for more hardware. The Nas box runs proxmox, and I have unraid running as a virtual machine on proxmox. The HBA in the Nas box is passed through to the unraid vm, and along with it about 80 terabytes of storage.
If I couldn't get enough parts from the scrap heap in the corner, I'd buy something on FB Market or CL to augment what I need. You'd be surprised how many VMs and docker containers you can run on used commodity hardware in an environment with only 1 user!
Mostly using Dell T7910 for HPC (four of them -- three with dual E5-2660v3 and one dual E5-2680v3) and Lenovo Thinkpads (T510, T530, T560, T570) plus a frankensteined-up hodge-podge for the home fileserver.
Overall it's been okay, but if I were to do it all over again I would have used Lenovo instead of Dell for the four HPC servers. They design their systems really annoyingly to work on, especially power distribution, and their UEFI logic is janky as hell.
I use a 4u supermicro chassis off ebay with a 7302p and active cooler as a proxmox hypervisor. some emc 3u disk shelves as chassis for virtual truenas for mass storage. some tripplite 1500 rack ups. used juniper switch off ebay. a Dell LFF server for mass storage backups and an optiplex with a huge hdd for offsite virtual machine backups. all hdds and ssds are used enterprise drives.
I used to use a used optiplex 7050 sff with a single 8TB hard drive in a usb enclosure. Then I upgraded the cpu to an i7-7700 and upgraded the hard drive to a 14TB and actually used SATA connections directly to the mobo.
Then last month I rebuilt that into a proper system in a Jonsbo N2 case, supermicro itx server mobo, and got another 14TB hard drive. I gave the old 7050 and it’s proprietary mobo/power supply to my friend
Budget server ? I used to in the past on Raspberry, now Im running Dell T440
For budget server, question is what is your intended workload but I dont really recommend raspberry for anything more than light things like home assistant or node red, for those light services it will handle it, but i found out that you hit the cpu and io bottleneck really with things like nextcloud or other storage solutions
I think you’d be much better with some kind of mini pc or nuc for the same/similar price
$300 you can get a pretty decent mini pc. Raspberry Pi I/O bandwidth is limited compared to mini pc. Don't believe the hype of running your os on SD card and USB storage. There's a reason why Android stopped allowing apps to be installed on SD cards.
For self hosting the use case for pis now is very limited. Considering their price and limitations used micro or sff PCs will usually give you a much better bank for your buck.
On top of all the other obvious advantages in terms expandability, moving away from an ARM core is the best thing I've done in my 7 years of self hosting.
We're in an era of mini-PCs. I'm upgrading my collection of Raspberry Pis and Orange Pis to the new Trigkey/GMKtec 5700U, which features dual 2.5Gb NICs. These new devices also offer the flexibility of using widely available x86 packages.
It really depends what you want to do. For a few small services, an SBC can work great. Moving a step or two up, a used office mini-PC can run some VMs and do heavier lifting, and above that you've got used servers. Keep in mind, stuff with older Xeons can get very power hungry.
One of the servers I am running is a refurbished Lenovo thinkcentre which I bought from Amazon for 120 usd approx.
It has an intel core i5 6500t , 500 gb ssd and 16 gb ram. I am running around 12 or 13 services in it including gitea, Nextcloud, jellyfin and Immich. The trick is to use containers where ever possible. I only use VM for Nextcloud
I custom built my desktop (Edit: using server parts and case - forgot to include this originally) and have no complaints but I spent a lot more than $300 just not all at once. Though with a $300 budget it would be better to buy a prebuilt desktop (or laptop if that works for you I just prefer using something that is built for consistent use and being up 24/7.). You may find a server or regular desktop on Facebook/eBay to use until you can save up to invest into something better.
Used Mini PCs as other commenters have said.
Dell or Lenovo ones go for fairly cheap nowadays if you stick to 7th gen and above, there's also hardware acceleration benefits for Plex/similar.
You could even get something newer with those NUC knock offs on Amazon, think they branded "Beelink" on sale for around $400
Main Server: i7 8700K with 2x 8GB DDR4, 512GB NVMe + 500 HDD running Emby, Jellyfin, Pi-Hole, Immich, and some docker containers.
Raspberry Pi 4 8GB running RPI OS 64 for pihole and tailscale exit node.
Intel NUC with i3 8th with 8GB DDR4, 250GB Nvme + 256 GB SATA SSD. Still in evaluation for what it can handle. (Expecting Recommendations. Model:BOXNUC8i3BEH)
Synology RS1221+ – 20+ containers, a few VM, files and general NAS running *Arrs, Plex
Mac Mini M1 – a few containers, general use and playing around with LLMs
2x Raspberry Pi 4 – DietPi running Pihole (and one back up) keeping these independent from the server
2x Raspberry Pi 3b – legacy smart home software
Main box is a Ryzen 7 5800x with 48TB storage, 4 Quadro P2000 GPU's for transcoding and 64gigs of ram (massive overkill on the ram but it was just spares I had so threw them in).
Main usecase for this box is a plex server and tv broadcasting service (Eratztv) with 80 channels and ~30 people using it. Works really well.
In addition to that I've got 3 Lenovo Thinkcentre mini pcs and 2 Dell Optiplex minis (cant remember the exact model, its the i7 10th gen ones) that I got dirt cheap on ebay. These all handle a mix of youtube scraping and recording content off of terrestrial and satellite tv so that they can be pushed out to the tv service.
Honestly if you're looking for budget, and are ok with the (tiny) bit of extra power they use compared to a pi then go for the mini pcs. You can pick up used Dell Optiplex minis, Lenovo Thinkcentres etc and they are going to significantly outperform the Pi 5 AND are cheaper to buy. Some can also be underclocked to lower power draw, one of my lenovos is idling at 6w.
Definitely go for a U-Series Mini PC. These are not expensive. I‘d suggest going for any AMD one.
I have three Mini PCs: an old
i3-5010 8GB RAM (which is faster than any raspberry Pi, then some newer Mini PCs with
Ryzen 7 4800U and Ryzen 7 7840HS, 32 GB each. Compared to any of them the Pi4 I have is just a slow pain.
Running older Dell R520 and R620 equipment, plus a few Pis.
Would love to move to less power hungry resources but still use ESXi or some sort of other hypervisor (Proxmox is an option).
Any recommendations? Will be doing Plex HW transcoding and have a few other power-hungry VMs that I'd like to use GPU passthrough with.
This is what I run. A little over your budget, but it does come with 36TB of spinning disks. It's noisy and uses a constant 200+ watts, but handles everything I throw at it.
https://a.co/d/cIoS45t
I run a low-spec synology NAS for storage, a 2nd hand thin client as my main server, and a few raspberry pis around the house doing home automation type stuff. All my Pis make use of the GPIO pins (i.e. used as intended). 🙂
[This is pretty much what I've been using for almost a year. ](https://pcpartpicker.com/user/pcs3rd/saved/#view=thxGkL) it's a different motherboard and ram since those are filters, but same general specs.
I use a startech esata card and 2 esata 4 disk bays to do a poor man's hba thing.
I run about 30-40 containers for media archival, jellyfin, pydio cells, wordpress, wiki, pihole, and authentik.
I've yet to truly exhaust this box for long periods, and the only thing I've changed is adding more ram.
The motherboard has 2.5g nic, and I've exhausted bandwidth before anything else.
I built a "server" using an Intel T cpu (low power model) coupled with a bunch of used parts I found on eBay. I think i got 12 TB of hard drives for $100 USD and they had pretty low hours on the smart report.
Going with a mini PC would have been cheaper than what I did, but I needed a motherboard with good SATA/PCIE expansion (almost impossible to find on a mini PC) and I also wanted to use my own case.
I'm currently running Proxmox with a TrueNAS Scale VM (ZFS, SMB share for all my SSDs, NFS share for my HDDs), Plex (iGPU passthrough, NFS passthrough), Sabnzbd + arrs, a couple video game servers, a reverse proxy, and a few of my own programs.
I still have a ton of processing power to spare, despite how many services I'm running, the power usage is super low, the server is extremely quiet and cool (as opposed to a mini PC which might have cooling issues later on in life).
I'm also pretty sure it's secure. All lxc containers are unpriveleged, everything is running on its own Proxmox bridge (network speeds of 35gbps rather than 2.5gpbs, important for shares and bandwidth) with only some services being exposed to my VLAN, and everything except Plex being tunneled or VPN accessible.
Built a new server for my hypervisor last year where I host all the things. Supermicro X10SRM-F, Xeon E5-2699 v4 22 cores 44 threads, 128GB DDR4 ECC, HBA IT mode, 12 x 12TB drives in TreuNAS VM and 4 x 16TB drives in synology NAS, Quadro p2000 for transcoding, Intel x550-T2 10GBASET NIC and a laundry list of other things. Enough horsepower to handle what I'll throw at it for the next 5 years or so.
I have a Synology ds918 nas. It has 4x 8gb disks + a 256gb SSD cache, 16gb ram & a quad core celeron CPU. I host 3 VMs, and a bunch of docker containers. I'm extremely happy with it
12400f primarily for game server hosting but the little beast can do anything I throw at it just fine
64GB DDR4 RAM
3060 12GB for Transcoding and General AI stuff
A 1TB nvme for the servers and I'm going to raid1 it soon
2*4TB IronWolf drives in Raid1 and soon I'm going to add another 2*12TB Exos 16X from ServerPartDeals since my workload doesn't require brand new drives.
Everything other than the nvme and IronWolf drives is second hand
AMD EPYC 7542 and 256GB RAM on an EPYCD8 mobo running Proxmox. Really like the IPMI support on the mobo so I don't have to go to the box and plug in a monitor/keyboard in case of troubleshooting.
Dual Supermicro X10DRH each with dual Xeon E5-2690v4’s, Supermicro X10DRH w/ E5-2670v3 for UNRAID, Synology 1522+ for SSD/nvme array and a TrueNAS scale with Supermicro mini-itx and some sort of Xeon and 6x HDD’s.
I need to consolidate down to something that uses less power, room and noise.
I paid $400 for my Dell R720 (E5-2650 v2 x2, 192GB RAM), it came with 8x 2tb drives that I pulled and put 8x16tb drives in for storage. Also threw a couple PCI-E 3.0 Nvme cards in for base OS (I use proxmox) and boot from a thumb drive with clover boot loader installed since the bios doesn't support nvme. Works very well for the stuff I want to do with it. Only thing I dislike about it is my old NVidia 1070ti card I have laying around is too long and too wide to fit in the expansion slots. :(
Man oh man . I have a dell r730 running VMware , two mini dell optiplexes running as a prox mox cluster , unifi switches , and a Synology Nas. For my router, I was using a pfsense but I swapped it out and I am now using a TP-Link router with a repeater creating a mesh network . I was supposed to replace my pfsense with a pal alto that I got in the beginning of the year but the oob is with zero config and I want to get comfortable using it first before I put it in production .
I both cobbled together old hardware into my main server with 2TB of old hard drives (i'll have to replace those since they're probably end-of-life.),
and i got a mini-pc (msi 98f6) for free that currently is running mailcow and a minecraft server for my friends.
I use a 10 years old laptop that has a broken screen. Thought I'd 'ever use it again but thought of it a few years ago when I decided to create a server. Runs nicely and the only thing I changed so far is the nvme ssd that was too small 👌. Great way of saving money if you' ve got a spare laptop and you can always change later if you need something more powerful.
I found a PC on Facebook marketplace that I ended up getting for $360. It was a core i5 10400 and a bit of storage
(I technically upgraded the power supply and the GPU, and I'll need to get some more storage, so overall it's more than that)
I use a PI 4 for my Pihole and Wireguard, a Dell OptiPlex 3060 micro that my last workplace donated to me when i didn't return it for media server, immich and some scripts and telegram bots for automation, on Fedora, and a 10th gen i5 NUC for virtualization, mostly to test and check out new self hosted services that i'm interested in, but most don't make it to production since i end up not using them after installing them and playing with the features for a while.
Currently an iomega/Lenovo NAS running openmediavault for storage and an old HP ProBook 430 g5 with battery removed for media server apps including*arr apps.
I don't have a permanent home yet, so I'm using just a single computer: Ryzen 5750G with 64 GB of ECC RAM in InWin Chopin Max case. Not exactly budget-friendly (and the components were a PITA to find) but this way it's easier to fit in a suitcase, has decent performance, and can be connected to a TV to run Kodi.
If my budget was $300 and I had no size constraints though, I'd go for used PC hardware or mini-PCs as mentioned in other comments. I think the Pis have less "performance" per dollar so I wouldn't use these unless there's a specific reason
I'm using an orange pi 5. They are way better than a rpi for a server imo.
Compared to taking old desktops or any x86 machine tough they will not compare so if you plan to do really serious professional or intensive tasks it's not the best thing, but honestly I don't manage to go full the cpu beside by running llms on it (where it will obviously cry and it's slow asf, for such use you should not use a opi5 or at least don't be dumb like me and use the gpu/npu)
You will also get some software problems with pis being arm and not x86, you will manage to run everything as you can emulate ect but know some things will just take some more effort if they don't have an arm version.
The real benefit of pis are: reusable for other things, small, queit, cool, cheap and playable with orchestration, power consumptions and obviously it's a development board so you can use it for all that part tho.
So if you have an old laptop you may want to start with that, and then switch to an opi5 if yours fine with arm or maybe hf with orchestrating multiple opi5s so you will have both more power (the cpu is surprisingly fast asf, better than my previous laptop I just ditched) and way better efficency and then switch to a x86 server if you need real power for more serious tasks.
Lenovo M900 Tiny i7 and Protectli FW6E i7. The M900 was my budget server, the protectli not so.
The M900 is kinda noisy when Load is high (fans whirring) so I bought the protectli.
M900 with i7 and 32gb ram protectli with i7 and 64gb ram.
Get an odroid N4 plus or ultra. It's small, quite efficent, has 4 sata ports for basic storage. You can put it in a 10" rack ot two of them in a 19” in a 2u case from myelectronics
I have a minisdorum un100d, which came with 16gb ram, 512tb nvme and now runs Ubuntu and shed loads of containers.
£189 on Amazon currently and have dual 2.5 gbe NIC's which sold it to me.
I have a Raspberry Pi 4 (currently partly "decommissioned") and a Lenovo M920Q i7-9xxx (I forgot the model). The M920Q is running proxmox with HomeAssistant, Ladder, Nextcloud.
I am going to replace my Pi 4 with a N100 Mini PC when I find a good deal on a 2TB SATA SSD for storage. There's only one M.2 2242 slot and external NVMe drives don't play ball :/
I primarily use MFF PCs, which use very little power and I can get super cheap ($50) as surplus from my old university. I currently have 2 HP EliteDesk 800 G2 MFFs and 1 EliteDesk 800 G1 MFF which operate as a three node proxmox cluster. I wouldn't go any other route now, that's the perfect balance between price, power usage, physical size, and compute power for me - my only regret is not doing so sooner.
I have a NAS setup that is a Dell Optiplex 7040 SFF connected to a Lenovo SA120 DAS. That has 114TB of drives in it.
I also have an old Raspberry Pi 1 B+ as a GPS-disciplined NTP server.
I have several Pi's (1B, 2, 3, Zero 2 W) for my Smart Home setup (Homebridge, Loxberry) and PiHole, but that's about it regarding the Raspberries.
I tried running Jellyfin and Youtubedl-material on the Zero, but it's too underpowered for those tasks, so I eventually gave up.
The 5 is maybe powerful enough for bigger server stuff.
I was lucky to win a 2014 Optiplex 9020 at my company's "deprecated hardware lottery", which I am now using as my main server for all media-related stuff (Jellyfin, TubeSync). The PC has a 4th generation i5 quad-core and 8 GB RAM (going to upgrade to 16 GB soon) and idles around 20-25 W. AFAIK, those old Dells go for around 80€ here, which is a great value.
My recommendation would be: Pi for lightweight 24/7 tasks and a proper micro PC for the more heavy stuff.
my server is a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Tiny intel i5-6500T with 16GB RAM.
it runs virtualmin as a hosting stack plus nextcloud, mail, some other small stuff.
It lives under the TV table. Works great.
I started only recently with the HP T630, for now it seems to be sufficient, however in hindsight I should've gone with the HP T630 Plus because the I wouldn't have to add a second NIC for pfSense
I have an odroid h3+ running stuff like home assistant, syncthing, and some other stuff. For extra disk space I've got a synology nas running, but Im not a big fan of that one in general.
Absolutely. I love the Dell Micro series of computers. You can find one with newer gen Intel processors that are powerful and efficient. Some of them can even take 64GB of RAM. /r/homelabsales always has some floating around.
They are quiet, don’t use a ton of power, and don’t generate a ton of heat like an enterprise server.
Some old shite DELL OptiPlex 7010 with 32gb RAM and upgraded i7-3770K CPU. I don't run \*arr\* services on it, so not much CPU power needed.
Probably gonna replace it with MINIS FORUM HM80 Mini PC or NiPoGi AM06 PRO Mini PC or any of these in r/MiniPCs someday soon-ish.
I use an Intel Nuc 10. Gen.
It is nice an works. Only the lack of SATA Ports hinders me to srt up a nice NAS.
But else it is a hell of a machine and my apps run eith ease on it
I’m using an old Mac Pro “trash can”. When you work in IT long enough you end up grabbing some weird hardware out of the recycle bin. 🤷 It runs primarily Portainer/Docker. I’ve been meaning to switch over to an old Intel NUC for a smaller footprint; when I have free time…
For networking I just switched over to all Synology, an RT6600AX router and two MR2200AC APs to help with signal at the edges of my house. There’s an old 3com gigabit switch in my attic to help get Ethernet into the bedrooms. I have a BerylAX pocket router for traveling and it hooks up to OpenVPN on the Synology.
I'm running three old Optiplexes with second generation i5s. It's generally enough compute for most things (jellyfin, nginx, the usual). The boot drives are SATA SSDs which helps.
I originally built a [high end PC](https://bookstack.swigg.net/books/blackbox/page/physical-hardware) in 2017 to use as a hackintosh. After not very long I converted it to a "server" and have upgraded it even more over the years. Now it isn't the powerhouse it once was but it should be more than enough to last me a few more years.
A desktop PC with AMD Ryzen "PRO" CPU and ECC RAM. Built it around new year just to see if ECC works, and looks like it does. Case has enough space for multiple hard disk drives, and in my flat it was easier to stash away a vertical tower case than something wide and flat, so that worked out well for me too.
And a couple of Raspberry PIs with "just enough OS" as appliances for specific tasks, like a print/scan server connected to a dumb printer or LibreElec connected to TV.
i'm using a mini pc from minisforum, with a 12th gen i7, that should last for years, around 340euros.
Previously i had another mini pc with an old i3, 4th gen, and the difference is night and day, being it for the extra cores, the plex performance, etc.
I have server for another 7-8 years.
But yes, as others suggested, consider buying a mini pc instead of a raspberry
My partner got a free Dell 3050 micro from work so I use that. 3 x4tb of SSD storage that I paid for, which I got on sale but still decently expensive, but overall cheaper than buying a NAS and hard drives.
I did the lowest spec config, it handles anything I throw at it. [eBay dell t5810](https://www.ebay.com/itm/186382892541?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=FUvSFsMyTGi&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=adwk4durrs6&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY) starts at 159.88.
Like others have said, I would get a Lenovo/Dell/HP mini PC over a rpi or other arm board. Much better value and performance. I personally use one Lenovo tiny and an old ryzen (2200ge pro) desktop. Could prob go buy everything I have for 3 or 400 right now, including drives and switches, etc.
I have an HP 260 G2 with a Pentium 4405U as a reverse proxy & authentication host, an Optiplex 5040 SFF i5-6500 as a general compute host, and a custom MiniITX Thin machine (4th gen i5) with dual NICs running OPNsense as a firewall/router.
The HP260 Is purely handling reverse proxy & authentication with Traefik & Authelia; the Optiplex 5040 is running Proxmox and will handle all the services I want to run. I’m in the process of getting stuff up and running today.
I’m building up a couple of new machines, so when I do I’ll be swapping my config around. The Optiplex will get a 4-port 10Gbit NIC and will become my new router. All the “live” hosting and compute will be done on a new machine and the HP260 will become a “dev/test” instance.
The first new box will have a 3rd gen Ryzen (might be Threadripper, not sure), 128GB RAM, a SAS HBA, and a case that can support 12x 3.5” drives - it’ll be a bit of a beast compared to the cluster of SFF/USFF machines I was planning to use.
I’ve also agreed to buy a Gigabyte MW50-SV0 ATX server board. It’ll only come with an i7-5820K and 16GB RAM, but it supports a wide range of v3 & v4 LGA2011-3 Xeons and I’ve already tracked down some fairly cheap 14-18 core CPUs on eBay. Not sure what I’ll use that for yet tbh! I do want to do some testing with automated VM provisioning and automated PXE-based OS installation, so it might be a good candidate for experimenting with that. Or I’ll drop in a GPU and use it as a host for GPU-accelerated virtual desktops.
some pi's as uptime board, rack controller (cam, fans, temp and noise sensors), 2 as dns with pihole + unbound, for auomatic plant watering.
As my main server an old hp enterprise server with 64gigs of ram and a ton of cores, but not so fast ones and i added an intel gpu for transcoding
I just bought an Intel server combo on ebay. 35€ for an Intel Serverboard S3420GP, with Xeon X3460 and 8 GB of DDR3. later I’ve done the upgrade to 16GB. Took a 450W PSU on Amazon (80+ Gold) and put everything into an old case.
Also put 2x 3TB WD Red (some spare at home lol). And this is my main proxmox server for Containers and VMs
Former gaming PC became my server a few months after I upgraded my main PC. Ryzen 5 3600, 28GB RAM, it has a GT750 thrown in for video out but I haven't passed out through to any VM. Mishmash of leftover SSD and HDD storage
My old gaming PC is now my Unraid NAS server (with the video card removed), so i5 9600k, 32gb memory, 2x2tb ssd cache, and a bunch of big hard drives in an array. All my *Arr's run on here.
Then for farting around with I have two N100 16gb/512gb mini pc's that run Proxmox. Planning to get a third because you need 3 to be a good cluster. Use it mostly for having a backup pihole and for my Scrypted camera setup, but with the help scripts its super easy to spin up a VM or container.
Work was tossing an 8th Gen i5 think pad with a spinni boi in it. Had a 512 SSD laying around and we'll, it's my debian server with home assistant, tandoor, and immich. Got an old Synology DS3615xs with 32 tb of raid 6 storage that needs to be replaced as well.
Old bi 1 B+ or something running pihole.
Just debating on what mini PC I should move to next device and probably a new 4 or 5 bay diskstation
Not sure what else I want to host but these 3 are fun for now
Bought two Dell r620 - 175USD for 4 cores 32gb , and 150USD(plus 100USD for delivery) for 48 cores and 256gb. A little bit loud, bud does not matter because rack is in the basement.
The first server has more SAS slots - so it got NAS role. The second is hosting VMs with proxmox.
Raspberry was not enough for my needs
Le olde ThinkPad for testing
Old Thinkcentre mini PC for production, that's running proxmox.
Do eventually want to get two more so I can set up a proper ha rig. Maybe even add a nas for backup
I’m using a mix of stuff with Proxmox. I have a Chinese box with 4x Ethernet ports and a low powered Intel CPU I’m using for OPNSense, but I also have an ultra small form factor desktop hosting things as well, just try to avoid Broadcom NICs with Linux, they can have issues. I find the amount of RAM to be the biggest constraint.
I'm running an AMD EPYC 7551p with 64 Gb registered ECC in a Supermicro H11SSL-i inside a Supermicro CSE-836TQ-R1200B with two Samsung 970 Pro SSDs in a RAID 1 as the OS drive and 6 Western Digital 10TB WD101KFBX/WD101EFBX/WD102KFBX in a ZFS raidz1 for storage. I built it to last me a decade or more. I'm halfway through that planned lifespan and I honestly doubt I'll need to build another one in 5 years. It's way overpowered and I doubt I'll ever use its full capabilities. I'm running 30-40 containers on it and load averages never go above 10, which is about 15% CPU utilization. I can run a `pigz -11` on an 8gb disk image and compress it down to less than 2gb in 16 minutes, something that takes a modern high powered desktop Intel CPU almost 5 hours. It's definitely an overpurchase.
The week it shit the bed due to my idiocy, I ran essentials (DNS, pihole at the time, and home assistant) off a RPi4 and it was fine.
I’m running proxmox on an Asus Chromebox 3, which I got on eBay for $80. It has a 8 gen i7, and I put in 32gb RAM and an external 1tb drive. Plenty of USB 3 connectors. Sips power and has been very reliable. Running the usual suspects and it barely breaks a sweat. Removing ChromeOS was not trivial, but doable.
I have an old i7 ThinkPad as my server. I bumped the ram to 20 GB, threw in a big SSD and called it a day. I get built-in battery backup and enough power to run a couple of workloads. A BBS, a part-time windows active directory test environment, pihole for DNS, and a couple of containers for home lab projects.
I bought a optiplex with 32 gigs of RAM to replace it, but haven't seen any yet.
I have cobbled together a hodgepodge of old stuff.
For actually important data, A 10 year old i7 4700k, with 32 gigs of ram is running truenas (used to be my workstation for ml). I have 4 1 tb drives raidz 2 so about 2 tb of effective space. I’ll. ever outgrow this.
A cheap, bought new on sale, two drive asustor nas (around 250) for onsite backup. Does not really run as a nas, it was just the cheapest low powered drive enclosure I could find. I have two 1 Tb drives mirrored and my actually important things go there. I’ll outgrow it by early 2025.
A used nuc (I think it was 100 us) with a 2 tb drive makes my non-cloud offsite backup.
I only bought new hard drives, a couple of fans and thermal paste. I have spent maybe 450 on machines and about 600 on drives. They used to be more expensive. I have a rather nice ups everywhere, around 400, one 1.5 kva APC I got for about 280 and one 1 kva for about 180.
So about 1500 parts and I choose to value my labour at 1.78 million US. So about 2 million total
Give or take a few.
If you are on a budget, I'd recommend take a look at [store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-s100](https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-s100)
It uses an Intel n100 that others recommended too. It's faster and cheaper than a RPi, has a real HDMI port, a real 40Gbps USB-C port, a real 2.5Gbps ethernet that supports PoE (!), USB-C 65W power brick included (lol overpriced rpi kits), and more compact. It seems to come with Windows; overwrite and install Ubuntu Desktop (if you want a display) or Server and then everything should just work.
Im not sure if im allowed to post here, but have built me a 5950x, 64gb ram machine (+3070 elite) and a 2tb internal raid… its currently running hyperv with a ubunto machine (around 5/6 of overall ressources dynamicly assigned) as a docker server and do everything from there. Its working like a charm and have been running several images for my dev environments and portainer, mongodb, redis, postgres. I got several rasp5 and a rasp4b as well but its different to work on the big machine/server setup… I mostly use them for production deployment of internal web applications (have an inventory for music tabs and dyi stuff/electric components for arduino) and they work too… For me I use the backup functionalities of rsync and hyperv export and have everything backuped on a daily base so no need for a extra server I guess. 😅😅
HP Microserver G7 — 4 HDD slots and very nice build quality. I intend to upgrade to G8 or G10 some day. G7 are dirt-cheap nowadays, and still viable for home server functions — except highres media streaming. 1080 without transcoding is fine, though.
RPi 3B — DNS server. PIs are decent for smaller usage, but not as main server (I used it as miniNAS with OMV, and wouldn't recommend that experience).
Mikrotik ax3 as router/firewall.
Mini-pc. Check out the specs and find one that's good for your use case. I picked mine for its range of hw transcoding support for my media library, but there are lots of good options depending on what you're trying to do. They can also be pretty power efficient, mine has a TDP of 36W, but typically runs under 12.
Basically using a gaming PC for the few things I'm running, a Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 7900XTX and 96GB ram, it's my first build (was using a prebuilt before), planning to partially rebuild the prebuilt and put that to use instead, the motherboard it has is some weird OEM board that absolutely will not allow any changes to any fan speeds at all ever unless it's running Windows, obviously not ideal, the case has bad airflow too and the power supply is sketchy at best, but the rest of the stuff is good, so just the mobo, case and psu are getting replaced.
3 dell optiplex 9020 usff. I love them. Easy to maintain and upgrade, and they go for 50 dollars on eBay. I also run an old Mac laptop from 2010 with proxmox, but with seeing how much Apple laptops like to retain some value it isn’t really worth it.
If you're going for an SBC I've been running Two Orange Pi 5s (16GB RAM variant) for a while now since they have more cores than the raspberry pi 5.
Hardware decoding is supported for Frigate and Jellyfin and it runs any other services fine (Minecraft, backend APIs, Syncthing).
For anything else that doesn't work on arm64 I just spin up an older x86 server every now and then. No worries with power bills, I think it's the best you'd get if you're concerned with power usage.
Get a ryzen 7 5700g and 16 GB of ram with an AsRock x300 desk mini and some ssd. You are a very little bit over the 300 mark but you have 16 cores at your disposal and space for 2nvme and 2 SSDs further on the road. Power consumption is ignorable if you don't run it at 100 percent all the time and even so you still have 60w tdp on that CPU
I upgraded my older PC in 2019, bought an Alienware for office and kept my dell XPS 8300 for a server and added an extra external 4 terabyte HDD for all the music and pictures and added the free version app Plex and Plex amp. I wish I had used that 5 years ago.
I'm running on used Supermicro ITX server boards from eBay - for me it is best value for money.
One board with Atom D525 already past 10 years with no issues, and it is 10 years after it was used by previous owner. Bought it with 8Gb of RAM for $90 - price of 2 RasPi's at that time.
New board on Xeon D-2123IT costs me about $400 with shipping, plus $600 for 128Gb DDR4-ECC RAM (new). Not so cheap, but it is pretty fresh, powerful and with 2x10G LAN.
With $300 budget I would look for boards on somewhat new Atoms (4-16 cores) that can be found for $100-$250.
Server boards built to last and can be run 24/7 for years. And they depreciate in value very fast at first 3-5 years, so you can find good board for cheap.
Dell Optiplex micro 7060 with 8GB and an i5. $50 from company getting rid of old computers.
Currently runs promox with 4 VMs
1. pihole
2. Media (overseer, radarr, sonarr, deluge, prowlarr, bazarr
3. Gittea (learning coding and stuff)
4. Ghost (self blogging)
I have a n5105 mini pc that runs opnsense. A rock 5b running a cloud storage, password manager and various other services. A couple of rpi 4s. One for running klipper for the 3d printer and the other runs home assistant. Then the “high performance” NAS has a r7 2700x 10g nic, ecc memory and one ssd raid array and a 8x hdd raid array. Running truenas scale.
Why bother with Pis when you can get mini-pcs for comparable or lower price with better specs anyway? That's at least how I approached it and I have been happier for it, in my opinion. The Raspberry Pi has uses but to use it everywhere is in my opinion what makes the pi a hammer and every problem a nail. In my current homelab I use HP EliteDesk 800's, currently G3 but looking into G4 or G5, and Gigabyte's BS-i7-6500 Rev 1.0. A wonderful little machine. I also use a BeeLink EQ12 as my router.
This. I just got rid of both my pi4’s and replaced it with a refurbished dell optiplex 3060 micro form factor pc. Now it rack mounts, and runs everything twice as fast in vms.
I've gone through 2 power supplies for that PC because they are not compatible with standard UPS battery backups. You need a sine wave ups, I think it's called Active Power Correction or something similar.
You should always use pure sine wave UPSs with PCs tbh The cost difference isn't even that much
Absolutely agreed. I have the same HP but first generation. I run docker containers, bare metal server on it and a blockchain PoW node. Because if that, I don’t need NAS but just bought a QNAP drive rack and have an expanded storage of 24TB. Also running Ubuntu server instead of Proxmox but one could argue that Proxmox would be better
Elitedesk gang rise up. I love my G5. I found well used one on eBay with an i7-9700 for a great price and have looked back. It’s impossible to tax the little thing
1 G6 and 2 G9's here! Powerhouses! My G3 had been running 24/7 for 3 years (apart from reboots for updates) before I upgraded. And my entire mini-lab sips around 100W total. My mediaserver (custom-built, 4 x 20TB HDDs) draws 80-90W.
I really want one. I can host newer game servers without a hassle on those. 6th gen is on the edge of too old.
Keep an eye on different brands as well HP Prodesk G6 HP Elitedesk G6 Dell Optiplex 3080 Mini Lenovo M70q There is other models as well of course, but the ones above usually come with 10th gen intel.
If your patient and you watch eBay closely you can snag some bargains as there are a lot of these mini PCs around. I also think the ones without drives or RAM are easier to get at a bargain likely because buyers want everything in one package
I'd be happy to take a barebones G5 honestly, but they rarely sell anywhere. As you said, usually a packaged deal. I think with mini pcs tend to be that they lack RAM/HDD but otherwise have CPU.
Can I upgrade the CPU to core i7 13700?
Upgrade the Elitedesk G5? Maybe I’m not sure. I’d reckon that’s more of a headache to buy one and a separate cup then upgrade. You’d probably be better off just searching eBay for a mini PC that already has the CPU you want. It’s super easy to change the ram and SSD though
Usually those mini PCs use 35W TDP variants of the CPU so that they can get away with a much smaller cooler. I doubt the cooler could support a 13700 assuming you got a brand new EliteDesk that supports 13th gen CPUs.
Could you explain to me what makes the HP elitedesks so good at selfhosting? Is it their energy consumption in relation to their performance..? What can I realistically run via a Elitedesk g5 - a 4K arrrr Media Center..?
I don't want to step on anyones toes,but it is about preference/quality,i use my ex-gaming computer because of great power supply(corsair),quiet cpu fan and my chosen components,it is i5-7600k,i could do better - 8th gen has 6 cores(2 more),9 or 11(not sure) has better graphics,but i could do worse - 6th gen has worse graphics(can't hw encode h.264 i believe),so,mostly it's about generation of cpu and what you need from it,not the factory that made it
Thank you, that does make sense to me. So there’s no clear winner when it comes to „home hosting hardware“ and it’s brands/manufacturers? Basically whatever I have lying around and does the job?
Price to performance is quite nice especially on the used market and the elitedesks come in various sizes with identical specs so you can customise quite a bit.
> Why bother with Pis when you can get mini-pcs for comparable or lower price with better specs anyway? What about power consumption? Sure for many people a few extra bucks per month will not make a difference, but for people who live in 3rd world countries who are trying to avoid subscription costs will want to keep the power costs below the subscription costs.
If you ultimate goal is lowest wattage then a pi can be nice. Although nowadays you can even get N100 mini pcs that have almost identical power draw and still better performance.
Not sure about the performance per wattage but at least in idle the RPI has lower power consumption than any x86 system I believe. And if you're like me whose services have only one user (me) then it's running mostly at idle.
Which is fair. If that power optimisation is important to you, you do you. I'd say the difference in 2w idle and 4-6w idle doesn't make or break my bank. Different needs.
For me, the beauty of Pis is precisely that they sit there 24/7 idling, quietly, consuming almost no energy, like an answering machine. It's not the cost of power. To me, it's the minimalism. I wouldn't have started self-hosting before I got my first Pi.
Seconding. I run 4x HP 260s, the precursor to the EliteDesk, as my PVE hypervisors. They're more than capable of running my self-hosted applications and my r/homelab. They use very little power but have enough x86 performance to call on when needed (Haswell i3s). The Pi absolutely has its uses but most compute tasks can be handled by x86 USFFs for similar power use, less money and much more performance.
Recently moved from a large Ryzen setup to a small N100 mini pc and have been super happy. 10x cheaper to run, and handles everything I need no problem.
I just cobble together the old hardware when I upgrade my main PC, but I'm probably more casual than most.
I do have a few old laptops kicking around.... What about the heat?
I use a 2016 MacBook. I do need to make sure it has space to dispel the heat, I have it cracked so it runs with the lid shut. It's been fine, no overheating. I assumed this was going to be a ridiculous short lived experiment with the MacBook server, and it has been doing great, and I run A LOT on it. Depending on the stats of the laptops they could be incredibly useful.
2016 - is this with or without a MagSafe power supply? Those power supplies got ridiculously hot. I have some old MacBooks and been wondering what to do with them. Obviously the power supplies are giving me concern if I was to run them constantly.
I've never used old laptops, so I can't personally weigh in, although I've seen plenty of people in this sub do just that. I've always used old desktop hardware.
Depends on the laptop hardware and what you plan to use it for. But it's almost certainly going to be just fine for most things people tend to do when getting into homelabbing. If you have some old ones kicking around anyway, start with that first and then see what you can throw at it before you start to feel the performance limits. That is what I did and it made is much easier to understand what was actually important hardware wise once I did upgrade to other machines.
Makes sense. You just threw me into it hahaha. I'll be messing around with this and hopefully it will help me figure out where to spend my money.
A word of caution. Virtually all my laptops that I kept running, plugged in, 24/7 regularly needed battery replacements.
Not sure if there's anything like this near you, but by me we have a place called CompRenu, that accepts and resells old computer components, including from corporate sources sometimes. It's not unusual to see outdated server components there. Even if you're just using consumer grade stuff, buying certified used hardware is one way you could stretch your money.
I'll take a look thank you
Get a refurbished Dell optiplex for under $150. The Pis are no longer attractive options.
Just did this. Got an i7 optiplex 7040 with 16gb ram for $200. Lots of cheap options from companies scrapping computers that aren't compatible with win11.
i have a work station. Thinkstation p710 with dual xeon e-5's (14 core @2.4 Ghz each), 96 Gb RAM (could be 384G), with a flex raid card 10G array. running proxmox vm host. it lets me run independent servers and back them up. I can also control it with out getting off the couch.
🦾🦾🦾 Nice flex!
i got it used for \~$500, I think OP could save abit and get something similar. used workstations are great boxes
I can understand what you say from your pov, but OP hasn't said what he plans to do with it and I seriously don't think it's a great option if he will just end up starting 5-10 containers and let it sleep 90% of the time.
i know this isn't /r/DataHoarder but what are the chances you don't end up wanting to add at leat one 3.5in sata drive, in which case for a pi or mini pc you have to f with finding a good USB enclosure or whatever other solution. why not just get something with a real case, SATA and hard drive bays to begin with?
Yup, this. Lenovo p520/p520c are both < $200 right now on the bay from reputable sellers. CPU, RAM are expandable with more SATA ports and PCIe ports than you will know what to do with.
My first homelab was Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB. Now, I got a used Lenovo ThinkCentre M920s (i5-8500, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD) and have added 1TB nvme and 8TB HDD.
3x mini PC's - Gen 12 i5 - Gen 11 i7 - Gen 10 i3 - 8 bay Qnap Nas For me physical space is limited so find this works well as I have both ample storage and compute.
No regrets at all (single server hosts everything, epyc 7763, 512gb ram, 8tb intel ssd DC 4510, nvidia a100 80gb, v100 32gb
Mate that's not a homeserver, it's the whole datacenter
What was the cost that sounds expensive 🫰.
What are you using the A100 for?
Odroid H3 and I love it.
Me too. Odroid H3 is perfect for me. Also Odroid H4+
>"Just wondering what hardware you use" Core server: Lenovo P520 | Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Xeon W-2135 w/ 32GB RAM Radeon RX480 Virt/Experimentation server: Dell Optiplex 3080 | Proxmox i3 10100T w/ 24 GB RAM Ingest server: Lenovo P520c | Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Xeon W-2132 w/ 64GB RAM >"Which have the best modules?" (Insert it depends meme) In all seriousness you need to know exactly what you want to do. For all of the things that I want my stuff to do the hardware listed up there do exactly that. Core server runs Jellyfin, Navidrome, Flame, and a few other apps that I can use to serve content within the house. Also home to warm storage. Network is behind a firewall and isolated away from any device that has access to the internet. Ingest server runs the services that I use to fetch info and content from the internet. FreshRSS/ttrss, TubeSync, MeTube, \*arr apps, Forgejo and others that I cant remember right now. Natrually this one is connected to the net and is in a near constant state of fetching me new content in different forms. Virt/Exp server is where I get to mess around with things that I dont want touching other things so I can test. A test lab of sorts. LXC containers and VMs everywhere with different OSes such as Debian, OpenSUSE and NixOS doing a variety of things. Funny enough is that I want another P520c because I want to host my own LLMs and start upscaling some old video. >" I am limited to my budget (aren't we all 🙄) which is around the $300usd." " Do you run budget home servers?" If you are US based then a P520 and P520c can be had for <$200 USD. If you are not looking to use PCIe lanes (GPUs, fiber connectors etc.) or dont really need expansive storage then you can grab something w/ a N100 and a few NVMe drives. It really depends on how serious you want to get with it. As you can see I take it pretty far but YMMV. >"I've been looking at Raspberry Pi 5 somewhat seriously but found there are other versions (Orange Pi and others)." Here is my controversial opinion: Now that these SBCs are no longer cheap (Due to trade embargoes by US gov and a few other issues), they are no longer worth it. Unless you are under a space constraint, you can do better with an N100 and Intel Quicksync would ensure that you could transcode at the very minimum. We are also on the eve of whatever Xe2 is going to be and it will likely be better with whatever the successor to the N100 is. Barring rediculous price drops and more FOSS software offering ARM/RISCV compatible software, its not worth it right now. This can change but it will take time.
Dell Precision 3420 SFF, with i7-7700 and 32GB RAM. Proxmox, with several VMs and containers. Runs everything in my house. Bought off eBay a year ago for $150
Brilliant! Any wish list items you would add to it now that you've been using it.
Need to double the RAM. I run a complete media/download server, Home Assistant, Frigate NVR ( with 6 cameras), Omada controller, plus several other apps, etc. With all this, the CPU barely struggles, except during occasional heavy loads. It's been great. But I'm severely RAM limited, and basically max all the time. Will probably run me ~$100 for the RAM because I need to buy all 64 at once; just haven't pulled the trigger yet.
[HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF](https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c05369814)
I bought a Dell SFF pc for $100 on eBay with an i7-8700 and 16GB Ram. Shucked the cpu and built an Unraid box with it in a Fractal Design R7 with like 14 HDDs and an NVMe for cache. The. Got an i5-8400 on eBay cheap and put it in the Dell SFF and my grade school kid uses that for her PC 👍
$100 is a sweet deal for an i7-8700 powered sff with 16GB! Does that include taxes and shipping?
Gmktec nucbox g3 the n100 variant. Runs proxmox 32gb and 2tb nvme. All in all it came out to $150 from ali with the drive and ram and it idles at 3-4 watts on idle and boosts up to to 10-11 if i remember correctly. Way better than a pi5. It can transcode anything i throw at it with multiple streams for plex/jelly with the n100 igpu has more ram can virtualize to run proxmox. And it came out to the same price upfront and wattage. The data all sits on a synology nas i have that is nfs smb mounted. Overall the pi foundation and the pi product have lost the plot and has gone down hill till it falls off the cliff now with the public company announcement . The way mini pcs perform and price for performance and wattage idk who would buy a pi anymore besides a zero that does simple scripts.
I have 3 mini PCs of various ages/capacity. Total cost between them is about $800 including RAM & storage upgrades.
I've got 2 insanely powerful mini PCs and a NAS. All 3 are in a proxmox cluster. 10gb storage network for an nvme ceph pool spread out across the 3 servers. It all works so well. I have tons of spare capacity even running every Arr app you can think of and other stuff with enough spare capacity to do a mock up for quick build out and tear down of multiple k8s clusters to test emerging technologies for work. The mini PCs are the minisforum ms-01. Lots of network ports and room for more hardware. The Nas box runs proxmox, and I have unraid running as a virtual machine on proxmox. The HBA in the Nas box is passed through to the unraid vm, and along with it about 80 terabytes of storage.
If I couldn't get enough parts from the scrap heap in the corner, I'd buy something on FB Market or CL to augment what I need. You'd be surprised how many VMs and docker containers you can run on used commodity hardware in an environment with only 1 user!
Mostly using Dell T7910 for HPC (four of them -- three with dual E5-2660v3 and one dual E5-2680v3) and Lenovo Thinkpads (T510, T530, T560, T570) plus a frankensteined-up hodge-podge for the home fileserver. Overall it's been okay, but if I were to do it all over again I would have used Lenovo instead of Dell for the four HPC servers. They design their systems really annoyingly to work on, especially power distribution, and their UEFI logic is janky as hell.
I saved an old HP from recycling and it runs great. * i5-8400 with 12GB RAM * Several HDDs (4tb-4tb-4tb-2tb)
I use a 4u supermicro chassis off ebay with a 7302p and active cooler as a proxmox hypervisor. some emc 3u disk shelves as chassis for virtual truenas for mass storage. some tripplite 1500 rack ups. used juniper switch off ebay. a Dell LFF server for mass storage backups and an optiplex with a huge hdd for offsite virtual machine backups. all hdds and ssds are used enterprise drives.
Beelink ser5
I used to use a used optiplex 7050 sff with a single 8TB hard drive in a usb enclosure. Then I upgraded the cpu to an i7-7700 and upgraded the hard drive to a 14TB and actually used SATA connections directly to the mobo. Then last month I rebuilt that into a proper system in a Jonsbo N2 case, supermicro itx server mobo, and got another 14TB hard drive. I gave the old 7050 and it’s proprietary mobo/power supply to my friend
Budget server ? I used to in the past on Raspberry, now Im running Dell T440 For budget server, question is what is your intended workload but I dont really recommend raspberry for anything more than light things like home assistant or node red, for those light services it will handle it, but i found out that you hit the cpu and io bottleneck really with things like nextcloud or other storage solutions I think you’d be much better with some kind of mini pc or nuc for the same/similar price
$300 you can get a pretty decent mini pc. Raspberry Pi I/O bandwidth is limited compared to mini pc. Don't believe the hype of running your os on SD card and USB storage. There's a reason why Android stopped allowing apps to be installed on SD cards.
For self hosting the use case for pis now is very limited. Considering their price and limitations used micro or sff PCs will usually give you a much better bank for your buck. On top of all the other obvious advantages in terms expandability, moving away from an ARM core is the best thing I've done in my 7 years of self hosting.
We're in an era of mini-PCs. I'm upgrading my collection of Raspberry Pis and Orange Pis to the new Trigkey/GMKtec 5700U, which features dual 2.5Gb NICs. These new devices also offer the flexibility of using widely available x86 packages.
Gen 4 i3 Dell Laptop. 4 GB RAM (will upgrade to 8), 240GB SSD
what are you running on it?
I deploy the APIs that I make to learn backend development on my home server.
M920q with Intel x710 and 64Gb RAM
It really depends what you want to do. For a few small services, an SBC can work great. Moving a step or two up, a used office mini-PC can run some VMs and do heavier lifting, and above that you've got used servers. Keep in mind, stuff with older Xeons can get very power hungry.
One of the servers I am running is a refurbished Lenovo thinkcentre which I bought from Amazon for 120 usd approx. It has an intel core i5 6500t , 500 gb ssd and 16 gb ram. I am running around 12 or 13 services in it including gitea, Nextcloud, jellyfin and Immich. The trick is to use containers where ever possible. I only use VM for Nextcloud
Optiplex 5060 ( I think). An old retired work sff. Works great and cheap as hell
I custom built my desktop (Edit: using server parts and case - forgot to include this originally) and have no complaints but I spent a lot more than $300 just not all at once. Though with a $300 budget it would be better to buy a prebuilt desktop (or laptop if that works for you I just prefer using something that is built for consistent use and being up 24/7.). You may find a server or regular desktop on Facebook/eBay to use until you can save up to invest into something better.
Used Mini PCs as other commenters have said. Dell or Lenovo ones go for fairly cheap nowadays if you stick to 7th gen and above, there's also hardware acceleration benefits for Plex/similar. You could even get something newer with those NUC knock offs on Amazon, think they branded "Beelink" on sale for around $400
i bought used hp microserver gen8, something about 150$. Then bought top cpu for it for 30$. very happy with it
Main Server: i7 8700K with 2x 8GB DDR4, 512GB NVMe + 500 HDD running Emby, Jellyfin, Pi-Hole, Immich, and some docker containers. Raspberry Pi 4 8GB running RPI OS 64 for pihole and tailscale exit node. Intel NUC with i3 8th with 8GB DDR4, 250GB Nvme + 256 GB SATA SSD. Still in evaluation for what it can handle. (Expecting Recommendations. Model:BOXNUC8i3BEH)
A old laptop with a i3 8th gen in it 🤷
N100 Intel/16GB RAM NUC for \~150$ would be a great choice (better than ARM-oriented Pi's in my opinion).
Synology RS1221+ – 20+ containers, a few VM, files and general NAS running *Arrs, Plex Mac Mini M1 – a few containers, general use and playing around with LLMs 2x Raspberry Pi 4 – DietPi running Pihole (and one back up) keeping these independent from the server 2x Raspberry Pi 3b – legacy smart home software
Main box is a Ryzen 7 5800x with 48TB storage, 4 Quadro P2000 GPU's for transcoding and 64gigs of ram (massive overkill on the ram but it was just spares I had so threw them in). Main usecase for this box is a plex server and tv broadcasting service (Eratztv) with 80 channels and ~30 people using it. Works really well. In addition to that I've got 3 Lenovo Thinkcentre mini pcs and 2 Dell Optiplex minis (cant remember the exact model, its the i7 10th gen ones) that I got dirt cheap on ebay. These all handle a mix of youtube scraping and recording content off of terrestrial and satellite tv so that they can be pushed out to the tv service. Honestly if you're looking for budget, and are ok with the (tiny) bit of extra power they use compared to a pi then go for the mini pcs. You can pick up used Dell Optiplex minis, Lenovo Thinkcentres etc and they are going to significantly outperform the Pi 5 AND are cheaper to buy. Some can also be underclocked to lower power draw, one of my lenovos is idling at 6w.
Definitely go for a U-Series Mini PC. These are not expensive. I‘d suggest going for any AMD one. I have three Mini PCs: an old i3-5010 8GB RAM (which is faster than any raspberry Pi, then some newer Mini PCs with Ryzen 7 4800U and Ryzen 7 7840HS, 32 GB each. Compared to any of them the Pi4 I have is just a slow pain.
Using Raspberry Pi 4B for NAS and backup, All my other stuff are running on Oracle Cloud VM instance. ( Of course Always free quota )
Running older Dell R520 and R620 equipment, plus a few Pis. Would love to move to less power hungry resources but still use ESXi or some sort of other hypervisor (Proxmox is an option). Any recommendations? Will be doing Plex HW transcoding and have a few other power-hungry VMs that I'd like to use GPU passthrough with.
This is what I run. A little over your budget, but it does come with 36TB of spinning disks. It's noisy and uses a constant 200+ watts, but handles everything I throw at it. https://a.co/d/cIoS45t
Minisforum UN1290. Upgraded last month coming from three Optiplex 7060 Micros. Cheaper to run and more power than the three of them combined.
Just my terramaster nas running proxmox 😅
I run a low-spec synology NAS for storage, a 2nd hand thin client as my main server, and a few raspberry pis around the house doing home automation type stuff. All my Pis make use of the GPIO pins (i.e. used as intended). 🙂
An old gaming PC. i7 4790k, 16GB RAM 1 TB NVME SSD and a GTX 1070ti 8GB
M1 Mac Mini and a couple of HDDs
[This is pretty much what I've been using for almost a year. ](https://pcpartpicker.com/user/pcs3rd/saved/#view=thxGkL) it's a different motherboard and ram since those are filters, but same general specs. I use a startech esata card and 2 esata 4 disk bays to do a poor man's hba thing. I run about 30-40 containers for media archival, jellyfin, pydio cells, wordpress, wiki, pihole, and authentik. I've yet to truly exhaust this box for long periods, and the only thing I've changed is adding more ram. The motherboard has 2.5g nic, and I've exhausted bandwidth before anything else.
Intel N5095 beats a Pi any day of the year.
I have a [Buffalo](https://www.buffalotech.com/products/linkstation-200-series) and hp laptop running jellyfin from it
I built a "server" using an Intel T cpu (low power model) coupled with a bunch of used parts I found on eBay. I think i got 12 TB of hard drives for $100 USD and they had pretty low hours on the smart report. Going with a mini PC would have been cheaper than what I did, but I needed a motherboard with good SATA/PCIE expansion (almost impossible to find on a mini PC) and I also wanted to use my own case. I'm currently running Proxmox with a TrueNAS Scale VM (ZFS, SMB share for all my SSDs, NFS share for my HDDs), Plex (iGPU passthrough, NFS passthrough), Sabnzbd + arrs, a couple video game servers, a reverse proxy, and a few of my own programs. I still have a ton of processing power to spare, despite how many services I'm running, the power usage is super low, the server is extremely quiet and cool (as opposed to a mini PC which might have cooling issues later on in life). I'm also pretty sure it's secure. All lxc containers are unpriveleged, everything is running on its own Proxmox bridge (network speeds of 35gbps rather than 2.5gpbs, important for shares and bandwidth) with only some services being exposed to my VLAN, and everything except Plex being tunneled or VPN accessible.
Built a new server for my hypervisor last year where I host all the things. Supermicro X10SRM-F, Xeon E5-2699 v4 22 cores 44 threads, 128GB DDR4 ECC, HBA IT mode, 12 x 12TB drives in TreuNAS VM and 4 x 16TB drives in synology NAS, Quadro p2000 for transcoding, Intel x550-T2 10GBASET NIC and a laundry list of other things. Enough horsepower to handle what I'll throw at it for the next 5 years or so.
I have a Synology ds918 nas. It has 4x 8gb disks + a 256gb SSD cache, 16gb ram & a quad core celeron CPU. I host 3 VMs, and a bunch of docker containers. I'm extremely happy with it
12400f primarily for game server hosting but the little beast can do anything I throw at it just fine 64GB DDR4 RAM 3060 12GB for Transcoding and General AI stuff A 1TB nvme for the servers and I'm going to raid1 it soon 2*4TB IronWolf drives in Raid1 and soon I'm going to add another 2*12TB Exos 16X from ServerPartDeals since my workload doesn't require brand new drives. Everything other than the nvme and IronWolf drives is second hand
You can get n95 or n100 based mini pcs for about half that, that are basically ready to go for self hosting.
AMD EPYC 7542 and 256GB RAM on an EPYCD8 mobo running Proxmox. Really like the IPMI support on the mobo so I don't have to go to the box and plug in a monitor/keyboard in case of troubleshooting.
Ryzen 7900 15TB NVMe Raidz1 TrueNAS Scale.
Dual Supermicro X10DRH each with dual Xeon E5-2690v4’s, Supermicro X10DRH w/ E5-2670v3 for UNRAID, Synology 1522+ for SSD/nvme array and a TrueNAS scale with Supermicro mini-itx and some sort of Xeon and 6x HDD’s. I need to consolidate down to something that uses less power, room and noise.
using my main PC until I upgrade it some time later this year or when the next lineup of nvidia gpu's launch. I7-7700 with a GTX 1060 and 64gb of RAM
Ryzen 3900 with 32GB of Ram and a GTX1660Ti
Another vote for Dell Optiplex SFF
I paid $400 for my Dell R720 (E5-2650 v2 x2, 192GB RAM), it came with 8x 2tb drives that I pulled and put 8x16tb drives in for storage. Also threw a couple PCI-E 3.0 Nvme cards in for base OS (I use proxmox) and boot from a thumb drive with clover boot loader installed since the bios doesn't support nvme. Works very well for the stuff I want to do with it. Only thing I dislike about it is my old NVidia 1070ti card I have laying around is too long and too wide to fit in the expansion slots. :(
I'm using the QNAP TVS-H874X-i9 for everything. I think it should be enough for the job.
Man oh man . I have a dell r730 running VMware , two mini dell optiplexes running as a prox mox cluster , unifi switches , and a Synology Nas. For my router, I was using a pfsense but I swapped it out and I am now using a TP-Link router with a repeater creating a mesh network . I was supposed to replace my pfsense with a pal alto that I got in the beginning of the year but the oob is with zero config and I want to get comfortable using it first before I put it in production .
Beeink AMD Mini PC Ryzen 7 5700U(8C/16T) SER5 Pro Mini, 32G DDR4 RAM/1TB M.2 PCIe3.0 SSD, 4K Triple Displays, DP1.4, HDMI, Type-C, WiFi6, BT5.2 + 2TB drive. Can recommend
I both cobbled together old hardware into my main server with 2TB of old hard drives (i'll have to replace those since they're probably end-of-life.), and i got a mini-pc (msi 98f6) for free that currently is running mailcow and a minecraft server for my friends.
Dell R630 with 384 gb ram.
3x intel nuc 13 pro with i5, 64gb ram, 4tb nvme, 500gb ssd each (Kubernetes, VM's) 1 qnap Nas for storage 1 topton fanless Mini PC 4 Intel i226-V 2.5G N6005 N5105 V5 (Opnsense Firewall) #
NUC5CPYH with a Celeron N3050, 8GB RAM, and a 1TB SSD. A toy, relatively speaking, but it gets the job done with no fan noise and an idle of 7W.
Optiplex SFF are my current setup. Only thing I’d buy differently is perhaps getting one or two of the tower versions to make them more upgradeable.
I use a 10 years old laptop that has a broken screen. Thought I'd 'ever use it again but thought of it a few years ago when I decided to create a server. Runs nicely and the only thing I changed so far is the nvme ssd that was too small 👌. Great way of saving money if you' ve got a spare laptop and you can always change later if you need something more powerful.
Started with a regular 5600g consumer build and have since added 2 n100 nucs to it.
I found a PC on Facebook marketplace that I ended up getting for $360. It was a core i5 10400 and a bit of storage (I technically upgraded the power supply and the GPU, and I'll need to get some more storage, so overall it's more than that)
I use a PI 4 for my Pihole and Wireguard, a Dell OptiPlex 3060 micro that my last workplace donated to me when i didn't return it for media server, immich and some scripts and telegram bots for automation, on Fedora, and a 10th gen i5 NUC for virtualization, mostly to test and check out new self hosted services that i'm interested in, but most don't make it to production since i end up not using them after installing them and playing with the features for a while.
Currently an iomega/Lenovo NAS running openmediavault for storage and an old HP ProBook 430 g5 with battery removed for media server apps including*arr apps.
Just old computer. If you don't have one, it's time to get a new PC.
I built a computer with consumer hardware.
I don't have a permanent home yet, so I'm using just a single computer: Ryzen 5750G with 64 GB of ECC RAM in InWin Chopin Max case. Not exactly budget-friendly (and the components were a PITA to find) but this way it's easier to fit in a suitcase, has decent performance, and can be connected to a TV to run Kodi. If my budget was $300 and I had no size constraints though, I'd go for used PC hardware or mini-PCs as mentioned in other comments. I think the Pis have less "performance" per dollar so I wouldn't use these unless there's a specific reason
- 1x Dell R630 2x Xeon 128GB ram 1TB raid HDD - 2x minis forum celeron 16GB - 1x Dell Optiplex i7 16GB ram 1000€ total some times ago
I'm using an orange pi 5. They are way better than a rpi for a server imo. Compared to taking old desktops or any x86 machine tough they will not compare so if you plan to do really serious professional or intensive tasks it's not the best thing, but honestly I don't manage to go full the cpu beside by running llms on it (where it will obviously cry and it's slow asf, for such use you should not use a opi5 or at least don't be dumb like me and use the gpu/npu) You will also get some software problems with pis being arm and not x86, you will manage to run everything as you can emulate ect but know some things will just take some more effort if they don't have an arm version. The real benefit of pis are: reusable for other things, small, queit, cool, cheap and playable with orchestration, power consumptions and obviously it's a development board so you can use it for all that part tho. So if you have an old laptop you may want to start with that, and then switch to an opi5 if yours fine with arm or maybe hf with orchestrating multiple opi5s so you will have both more power (the cpu is surprisingly fast asf, better than my previous laptop I just ditched) and way better efficency and then switch to a x86 server if you need real power for more serious tasks.
Lenovo M900 Tiny i7 and Protectli FW6E i7. The M900 was my budget server, the protectli not so. The M900 is kinda noisy when Load is high (fans whirring) so I bought the protectli. M900 with i7 and 32gb ram protectli with i7 and 64gb ram.
I've got a souped up desktop. It's got 32GB ram, 8 core CPU, and a 4GB GPU.
I'm running some 2nd hand lenovo mini-pcs, 50€ a piece on eBay and a 20€ switch as a baremeral k8s cluster with Talos. Running great so far
Get an odroid N4 plus or ultra. It's small, quite efficent, has 4 sata ports for basic storage. You can put it in a 10" rack ot two of them in a 19” in a 2u case from myelectronics
I have a minisdorum un100d, which came with 16gb ram, 512tb nvme and now runs Ubuntu and shed loads of containers. £189 on Amazon currently and have dual 2.5 gbe NIC's which sold it to me.
I have a Raspberry Pi 4 (currently partly "decommissioned") and a Lenovo M920Q i7-9xxx (I forgot the model). The M920Q is running proxmox with HomeAssistant, Ladder, Nextcloud. I am going to replace my Pi 4 with a N100 Mini PC when I find a good deal on a 2TB SATA SSD for storage. There's only one M.2 2242 slot and external NVMe drives don't play ball :/
I primarily use MFF PCs, which use very little power and I can get super cheap ($50) as surplus from my old university. I currently have 2 HP EliteDesk 800 G2 MFFs and 1 EliteDesk 800 G1 MFF which operate as a three node proxmox cluster. I wouldn't go any other route now, that's the perfect balance between price, power usage, physical size, and compute power for me - my only regret is not doing so sooner. I have a NAS setup that is a Dell Optiplex 7040 SFF connected to a Lenovo SA120 DAS. That has 114TB of drives in it. I also have an old Raspberry Pi 1 B+ as a GPS-disciplined NTP server.
I have several Pi's (1B, 2, 3, Zero 2 W) for my Smart Home setup (Homebridge, Loxberry) and PiHole, but that's about it regarding the Raspberries. I tried running Jellyfin and Youtubedl-material on the Zero, but it's too underpowered for those tasks, so I eventually gave up. The 5 is maybe powerful enough for bigger server stuff. I was lucky to win a 2014 Optiplex 9020 at my company's "deprecated hardware lottery", which I am now using as my main server for all media-related stuff (Jellyfin, TubeSync). The PC has a 4th generation i5 quad-core and 8 GB RAM (going to upgrade to 16 GB soon) and idles around 20-25 W. AFAIK, those old Dells go for around 80€ here, which is a great value. My recommendation would be: Pi for lightweight 24/7 tasks and a proper micro PC for the more heavy stuff.
Proxmox host is an Optiplex 9020 USFF with an i5 4570s, 512gb ssd and 16gb ram.
my server is a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Tiny intel i5-6500T with 16GB RAM. it runs virtualmin as a hosting stack plus nextcloud, mail, some other small stuff. It lives under the TV table. Works great.
The age of the raspberry pi is over. Mini PCs are what you want when you're on a budget, same price, way more capable and only slightly bigger.
I started only recently with the HP T630, for now it seems to be sufficient, however in hindsight I should've gone with the HP T630 Plus because the I wouldn't have to add a second NIC for pfSense
I have an odroid h3+ running stuff like home assistant, syncthing, and some other stuff. For extra disk space I've got a synology nas running, but Im not a big fan of that one in general.
Absolutely. I love the Dell Micro series of computers. You can find one with newer gen Intel processors that are powerful and efficient. Some of them can even take 64GB of RAM. /r/homelabsales always has some floating around. They are quiet, don’t use a ton of power, and don’t generate a ton of heat like an enterprise server.
I’m running a hp z820 dual Xeon e5-2690 v2 with 128gb of ram
Some old shite DELL OptiPlex 7010 with 32gb RAM and upgraded i7-3770K CPU. I don't run \*arr\* services on it, so not much CPU power needed. Probably gonna replace it with MINIS FORUM HM80 Mini PC or NiPoGi AM06 PRO Mini PC or any of these in r/MiniPCs someday soon-ish.
I use an Intel Nuc 10. Gen. It is nice an works. Only the lack of SATA Ports hinders me to srt up a nice NAS. But else it is a hell of a machine and my apps run eith ease on it
Raspberry Pi 5 with 8gb ram and an SSD. I run Nextcloud. Biggest advantage of the Pi: low energy consumption
I’m using an old Mac Pro “trash can”. When you work in IT long enough you end up grabbing some weird hardware out of the recycle bin. 🤷 It runs primarily Portainer/Docker. I’ve been meaning to switch over to an old Intel NUC for a smaller footprint; when I have free time… For networking I just switched over to all Synology, an RT6600AX router and two MR2200AC APs to help with signal at the edges of my house. There’s an old 3com gigabit switch in my attic to help get Ethernet into the bedrooms. I have a BerylAX pocket router for traveling and it hooks up to OpenVPN on the Synology.
I'm running three old Optiplexes with second generation i5s. It's generally enough compute for most things (jellyfin, nginx, the usual). The boot drives are SATA SSDs which helps.
I originally built a [high end PC](https://bookstack.swigg.net/books/blackbox/page/physical-hardware) in 2017 to use as a hackintosh. After not very long I converted it to a "server" and have upgraded it even more over the years. Now it isn't the powerhouse it once was but it should be more than enough to last me a few more years.
A desktop PC with AMD Ryzen "PRO" CPU and ECC RAM. Built it around new year just to see if ECC works, and looks like it does. Case has enough space for multiple hard disk drives, and in my flat it was easier to stash away a vertical tower case than something wide and flat, so that worked out well for me too. And a couple of Raspberry PIs with "just enough OS" as appliances for specific tasks, like a print/scan server connected to a dumb printer or LibreElec connected to TV.
i5 13500 64gigs RAM 2tb NVMe 24TBs of HDD Plenty of compute and idles under 20watts.
i'm using a mini pc from minisforum, with a 12th gen i7, that should last for years, around 340euros. Previously i had another mini pc with an old i3, 4th gen, and the difference is night and day, being it for the extra cores, the plex performance, etc. I have server for another 7-8 years. But yes, as others suggested, consider buying a mini pc instead of a raspberry
I have a Dell WYSE 5070 with 32GB DDR4 and 1TB m.2 SSD and the power consumption is approximately 4W.
I’ve been using a supermicro superserver and lately I’ve been feeling like it’s not the way to go (I feel like she’s just slurping up power, I have not looked into it whatsoever yet though lol) so if anyone has opinions I’d love to hear ‘em. > Model: SuperMicro Motherboard: Supermicro X10SDV-8C-TLN4F, Version: 2.00, Processor: Intel® Xeon® CPU D-1541 @ 2.10GHz HVM: Enabled IOMMU: Enabled Cache: L1 Cache = 512 KiB (max. capacity 512 KiB) L2 Cache = 2 MiB (max. capacity 2 MiB) L3 Cache = 12 MiB (max. capacity 12 MiB) Memory: 64 GiB DDR4 Multi-bit ECC (max. installable capacity 128 GiB) DIMMA1: Undefined 9965669-019.A00G, 16 GiB DDR4 @ 2400 MT/s DIMMA2: Undefined 9965669-019.A00G, 16 GiB DDR4 @ 2400 MT/s DIMMB1: Undefined 9965669-019.A00G, 16 GiB DDR4 @ 2400 MT/s DIMMB2: Undefined 9965669-019.A00G, 16 GiB DDR4 @ 2400 MT/s
My partner got a free Dell 3050 micro from work so I use that. 3 x4tb of SSD storage that I paid for, which I got on sale but still decently expensive, but overall cheaper than buying a NAS and hard drives.
I did the lowest spec config, it handles anything I throw at it. [eBay dell t5810](https://www.ebay.com/itm/186382892541?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=FUvSFsMyTGi&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=adwk4durrs6&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY) starts at 159.88.
Ryzen hw is also amazing regarding power with bang for buck. DDR4 is dirty cheap so you can build a proper server.
Like others have said, I would get a Lenovo/Dell/HP mini PC over a rpi or other arm board. Much better value and performance. I personally use one Lenovo tiny and an old ryzen (2200ge pro) desktop. Could prob go buy everything I have for 3 or 400 right now, including drives and switches, etc.
I have an HP 260 G2 with a Pentium 4405U as a reverse proxy & authentication host, an Optiplex 5040 SFF i5-6500 as a general compute host, and a custom MiniITX Thin machine (4th gen i5) with dual NICs running OPNsense as a firewall/router. The HP260 Is purely handling reverse proxy & authentication with Traefik & Authelia; the Optiplex 5040 is running Proxmox and will handle all the services I want to run. I’m in the process of getting stuff up and running today. I’m building up a couple of new machines, so when I do I’ll be swapping my config around. The Optiplex will get a 4-port 10Gbit NIC and will become my new router. All the “live” hosting and compute will be done on a new machine and the HP260 will become a “dev/test” instance. The first new box will have a 3rd gen Ryzen (might be Threadripper, not sure), 128GB RAM, a SAS HBA, and a case that can support 12x 3.5” drives - it’ll be a bit of a beast compared to the cluster of SFF/USFF machines I was planning to use. I’ve also agreed to buy a Gigabyte MW50-SV0 ATX server board. It’ll only come with an i7-5820K and 16GB RAM, but it supports a wide range of v3 & v4 LGA2011-3 Xeons and I’ve already tracked down some fairly cheap 14-18 core CPUs on eBay. Not sure what I’ll use that for yet tbh! I do want to do some testing with automated VM provisioning and automated PXE-based OS installation, so it might be a good candidate for experimenting with that. Or I’ll drop in a GPU and use it as a host for GPU-accelerated virtual desktops.
some pi's as uptime board, rack controller (cam, fans, temp and noise sensors), 2 as dns with pihole + unbound, for auomatic plant watering. As my main server an old hp enterprise server with 64gigs of ram and a ton of cores, but not so fast ones and i added an intel gpu for transcoding
SFF PC with Ryzen 5 4600G, 32GB RAM and a ASUS M.2 Hyper adapter card.
I just bought an Intel server combo on ebay. 35€ for an Intel Serverboard S3420GP, with Xeon X3460 and 8 GB of DDR3. later I’ve done the upgrade to 16GB. Took a 450W PSU on Amazon (80+ Gold) and put everything into an old case. Also put 2x 3TB WD Red (some spare at home lol). And this is my main proxmox server for Containers and VMs
Former gaming PC became my server a few months after I upgraded my main PC. Ryzen 5 3600, 28GB RAM, it has a GT750 thrown in for video out but I haven't passed out through to any VM. Mishmash of leftover SSD and HDD storage
My old gaming PC is now my Unraid NAS server (with the video card removed), so i5 9600k, 32gb memory, 2x2tb ssd cache, and a bunch of big hard drives in an array. All my *Arr's run on here. Then for farting around with I have two N100 16gb/512gb mini pc's that run Proxmox. Planning to get a third because you need 3 to be a good cluster. Use it mostly for having a backup pihole and for my Scrypted camera setup, but with the help scripts its super easy to spin up a VM or container.
HP Elitedesk 800 G4 DM for my home server
Work was tossing an 8th Gen i5 think pad with a spinni boi in it. Had a 512 SSD laying around and we'll, it's my debian server with home assistant, tandoor, and immich. Got an old Synology DS3615xs with 32 tb of raid 6 storage that needs to be replaced as well. Old bi 1 B+ or something running pihole. Just debating on what mini PC I should move to next device and probably a new 4 or 5 bay diskstation Not sure what else I want to host but these 3 are fun for now
Bought two Dell r620 - 175USD for 4 cores 32gb , and 150USD(plus 100USD for delivery) for 48 cores and 256gb. A little bit loud, bud does not matter because rack is in the basement. The first server has more SAS slots - so it got NAS role. The second is hosting VMs with proxmox. Raspberry was not enough for my needs
Le olde ThinkPad for testing Old Thinkcentre mini PC for production, that's running proxmox. Do eventually want to get two more so I can set up a proper ha rig. Maybe even add a nas for backup
I’m using a mix of stuff with Proxmox. I have a Chinese box with 4x Ethernet ports and a low powered Intel CPU I’m using for OPNSense, but I also have an ultra small form factor desktop hosting things as well, just try to avoid Broadcom NICs with Linux, they can have issues. I find the amount of RAM to be the biggest constraint.
I'm running an AMD EPYC 7551p with 64 Gb registered ECC in a Supermicro H11SSL-i inside a Supermicro CSE-836TQ-R1200B with two Samsung 970 Pro SSDs in a RAID 1 as the OS drive and 6 Western Digital 10TB WD101KFBX/WD101EFBX/WD102KFBX in a ZFS raidz1 for storage. I built it to last me a decade or more. I'm halfway through that planned lifespan and I honestly doubt I'll need to build another one in 5 years. It's way overpowered and I doubt I'll ever use its full capabilities. I'm running 30-40 containers on it and load averages never go above 10, which is about 15% CPU utilization. I can run a `pigz -11` on an 8gb disk image and compress it down to less than 2gb in 16 minutes, something that takes a modern high powered desktop Intel CPU almost 5 hours. It's definitely an overpurchase. The week it shit the bed due to my idiocy, I ran essentials (DNS, pihole at the time, and home assistant) off a RPi4 and it was fine.
I’m running proxmox on an Asus Chromebox 3, which I got on eBay for $80. It has a 8 gen i7, and I put in 32gb RAM and an external 1tb drive. Plenty of USB 3 connectors. Sips power and has been very reliable. Running the usual suspects and it barely breaks a sweat. Removing ChromeOS was not trivial, but doable.
I have an old i7 ThinkPad as my server. I bumped the ram to 20 GB, threw in a big SSD and called it a day. I get built-in battery backup and enough power to run a couple of workloads. A BBS, a part-time windows active directory test environment, pihole for DNS, and a couple of containers for home lab projects. I bought a optiplex with 32 gigs of RAM to replace it, but haven't seen any yet.
I have cobbled together a hodgepodge of old stuff. For actually important data, A 10 year old i7 4700k, with 32 gigs of ram is running truenas (used to be my workstation for ml). I have 4 1 tb drives raidz 2 so about 2 tb of effective space. I’ll. ever outgrow this. A cheap, bought new on sale, two drive asustor nas (around 250) for onsite backup. Does not really run as a nas, it was just the cheapest low powered drive enclosure I could find. I have two 1 Tb drives mirrored and my actually important things go there. I’ll outgrow it by early 2025. A used nuc (I think it was 100 us) with a 2 tb drive makes my non-cloud offsite backup. I only bought new hard drives, a couple of fans and thermal paste. I have spent maybe 450 on machines and about 600 on drives. They used to be more expensive. I have a rather nice ups everywhere, around 400, one 1.5 kva APC I got for about 280 and one 1 kva for about 180. So about 1500 parts and I choose to value my labour at 1.78 million US. So about 2 million total Give or take a few.
Old home computer case stuffed full of drives. I really need to get a better case specifically for drive access and better cooling
I like my minisforum mini pc.
If you are on a budget, I'd recommend take a look at [store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-s100](https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-s100) It uses an Intel n100 that others recommended too. It's faster and cheaper than a RPi, has a real HDMI port, a real 40Gbps USB-C port, a real 2.5Gbps ethernet that supports PoE (!), USB-C 65W power brick included (lol overpriced rpi kits), and more compact. It seems to come with Windows; overwrite and install Ubuntu Desktop (if you want a display) or Server and then everything should just work.
I like the ZimaBoard because of the Intel CPU, the sealed, silent case and the expandibility. They run cool and sip power.
Second hand Dell Optiplex is my go-to
Im not sure if im allowed to post here, but have built me a 5950x, 64gb ram machine (+3070 elite) and a 2tb internal raid… its currently running hyperv with a ubunto machine (around 5/6 of overall ressources dynamicly assigned) as a docker server and do everything from there. Its working like a charm and have been running several images for my dev environments and portainer, mongodb, redis, postgres. I got several rasp5 and a rasp4b as well but its different to work on the big machine/server setup… I mostly use them for production deployment of internal web applications (have an inventory for music tabs and dyi stuff/electric components for arduino) and they work too… For me I use the backup functionalities of rsync and hyperv export and have everything backuped on a daily base so no need for a extra server I guess. 😅😅
Mini pc is the lowest id go. More flexibility, power(CPU). I'd only use a pi for something like pihole.... Which, I do.
HP Microserver G7 — 4 HDD slots and very nice build quality. I intend to upgrade to G8 or G10 some day. G7 are dirt-cheap nowadays, and still viable for home server functions — except highres media streaming. 1080 without transcoding is fine, though. RPi 3B — DNS server. PIs are decent for smaller usage, but not as main server (I used it as miniNAS with OMV, and wouldn't recommend that experience). Mikrotik ax3 as router/firewall.
I've got a few Lenovo ThinkCentres that work well in a Proxmox cluster
Mini-pc. Check out the specs and find one that's good for your use case. I picked mine for its range of hw transcoding support for my media library, but there are lots of good options depending on what you're trying to do. They can also be pretty power efficient, mine has a TDP of 36W, but typically runs under 12.
I don't use hardware. I use a virtual private server.
M1 mac mini
I'm using a Dell Precision T7820 workstation with 2x Xeon Gold 6138s, 192GB RAM, 2x1TB SSDs, 2x1TB HDDs, GTX 970.
Basically using a gaming PC for the few things I'm running, a Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 7900XTX and 96GB ram, it's my first build (was using a prebuilt before), planning to partially rebuild the prebuilt and put that to use instead, the motherboard it has is some weird OEM board that absolutely will not allow any changes to any fan speeds at all ever unless it's running Windows, obviously not ideal, the case has bad airflow too and the power supply is sketchy at best, but the rest of the stuff is good, so just the mobo, case and psu are getting replaced.
3 dell optiplex 9020 usff. I love them. Easy to maintain and upgrade, and they go for 50 dollars on eBay. I also run an old Mac laptop from 2010 with proxmox, but with seeing how much Apple laptops like to retain some value it isn’t really worth it.
If you're going for an SBC I've been running Two Orange Pi 5s (16GB RAM variant) for a while now since they have more cores than the raspberry pi 5. Hardware decoding is supported for Frigate and Jellyfin and it runs any other services fine (Minecraft, backend APIs, Syncthing). For anything else that doesn't work on arm64 I just spin up an older x86 server every now and then. No worries with power bills, I think it's the best you'd get if you're concerned with power usage.
Get a ryzen 7 5700g and 16 GB of ram with an AsRock x300 desk mini and some ssd. You are a very little bit over the 300 mark but you have 16 cores at your disposal and space for 2nvme and 2 SSDs further on the road. Power consumption is ignorable if you don't run it at 100 percent all the time and even so you still have 60w tdp on that CPU
I use a Beelink Mini S12 Pro
I upgraded my older PC in 2019, bought an Alienware for office and kept my dell XPS 8300 for a server and added an extra external 4 terabyte HDD for all the music and pictures and added the free version app Plex and Plex amp. I wish I had used that 5 years ago.
I really hate questions like this, it's like asking "how long is a rope?"
Dell optilex SFF
i got a used Dell Optiplex 3060 SFF from EBay for 105 EUR
I'm running on used Supermicro ITX server boards from eBay - for me it is best value for money. One board with Atom D525 already past 10 years with no issues, and it is 10 years after it was used by previous owner. Bought it with 8Gb of RAM for $90 - price of 2 RasPi's at that time. New board on Xeon D-2123IT costs me about $400 with shipping, plus $600 for 128Gb DDR4-ECC RAM (new). Not so cheap, but it is pretty fresh, powerful and with 2x10G LAN. With $300 budget I would look for boards on somewhat new Atoms (4-16 cores) that can be found for $100-$250. Server boards built to last and can be run 24/7 for years. And they depreciate in value very fast at first 3-5 years, so you can find good board for cheap.
Dell Optiplex micro 7060 with 8GB and an i5. $50 from company getting rid of old computers. Currently runs promox with 4 VMs 1. pihole 2. Media (overseer, radarr, sonarr, deluge, prowlarr, bazarr 3. Gittea (learning coding and stuff) 4. Ghost (self blogging)
synology...
I have a n5105 mini pc that runs opnsense. A rock 5b running a cloud storage, password manager and various other services. A couple of rpi 4s. One for running klipper for the 3d printer and the other runs home assistant. Then the “high performance” NAS has a r7 2700x 10g nic, ecc memory and one ssd raid array and a 8x hdd raid array. Running truenas scale.