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Best "bang for your buck" NUC/Pi setup for Jellyfin/HomeAssistant/PiHole? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) by linkinkampf19@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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EDIT: Holy shit, was not expecting so much support for my inquiry. Thank you all for the bevy of ideas and solutions. I think I'm still gonna go for the Intel 12th Gen+ NUC style, although some of your setups seriously made me quite jelly. Maybe I'll get there one of these days. I'll update this when I finally lock down my purchase :)

Hey all, lurker for a bit, but just joined because I've started my journey of self hosting the simple stuff (or at least I hope it's simple). For the past couple years I've been using a RPi Zero W for PiHole, and more recently go into Jellyfin and Home Assistant, using an RPi4 and an RPi3+ respectively. I've also got a hand-me-down Synology ds214j NAS with 2x8TB in ~~RAID0~~ RAID1, which is about half full atm. I'm not expecting to expand that storage anytime soon, so I've pivoted to an attempt at combining the 3 Pis above into one NUC/SFF/etc device with a roughly similar power draw. Also looking at re-jumping back into 3D printing using OctoPrint.

I've looked briefly at jumping to a Pi5, but that led me down the rabbit hole with Jeff Geerling's article/video on Pi vs. NUC. I've continued to putter around looking at NUCs in the ~$200 range. Hoping to stick with MinisForum, GMKTek, or Beelink if possible, but only because... it's all I know. I'd like to also tinker deeper with Linux flavors, as I'm a noob at best with it but want to at least have some growing knowledge, as I've primarily been a Windows gamer and use Apple at the office almost exclusively. I'd like to try staying with AMD as I've slowly moved over from the "dark side" (don't hurt me) that is Intel and Nvidia.

Last nugget is that I've never tinkered with Docker, as it seems that may be the best route to host all these apps on one contiguous installation. I've new-ish to VMs too, so anything "Baby's First VM" would be nice.

I know I made a giant pile of wants/needs, so if there's no magical unicorn, I'm cool with other ideas. Thanks in advance, and I'm really keen on seeing what options I have.

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[–] party_planet@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I have a NUC with an intel N6005 in it for around that price, very happy with it.

[–] linkinkampf19@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Looks like that's a bit under-powered compared to the N100, but if it more than suits your needs, great! Again, I'm just happy with all the outpouring of info and ideas. Knowing that most NUCs are quite a bit more powerful than Pis is the best new in itself.

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[–] Paddy66@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

https://www.gmktec.com/products/nucbox-g3-plus-enhanced-performance-mini-pc-with-intel-n150-processor

This is going well for me - Jellyfin etc

[–] linkinkampf19@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Wow, yeah this looks great. 16GB/512GB for under $200 makes this a frontrunner for now. Outside of Jellyfin, what else do you run, and how do you have it containerized? I'm inching closer to Proxmox vs Docker due to issues brought up in other comments.

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Pi 4 should be plenty to run Jellyfin, homeassistant, pihole and octoprint. Docker setup is pretty straightforward, and I can vouch that HA & pihole containers work great on RPi, if you want to leave the Jellyfin setup as-is and put the others alongside.

If you're looking for an excuse to expand, my vote is for an N100 type system. I got one with 4 ethernet ports, PCIe for a wifi card, couple of NVME slots, and a half dozen SATA ports for $100-150. That's a huge step up in potential without much increase in power draw. With the right wifi card, you can even use it to replace your WAP/router.

[–] linkinkampf19@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Maybe I will try to redo the Pi4. Just wanna see if I can make a full backup of Jellyfin's config beforehand. Or, y'know, just buy a few extra microSD cards.

But yes, the excuse is valid. I feel like eventually I'll hit a wall with the Pi4, but I also dunno how much more I'm trying to expand anyway. Basically trying to get to that low power, self-sufficient plateau without going too overboard.

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If you have the spare cash, I found the N100 NAS motherboard to be a great source of occasional weekend projects, and now it very definitely looks like I've gone overboard.

I started out just wanting a file server to store backups.then...

DHCP and NAT because my ISP would only allow one user.
DNS so I could refer to systems by name
pihole
mythtv/tvheadend so I could watch OTA tv & archive CDs & DVDs
hostapd for Wifi
homeassistant
immich
nextcloud
tandoor recipes
just added fastenhealth for medical records

It didn't feel like a lot, because it took years. Among the amazing things has been all the times I've been able to upgrade the motherboard by just plugging the HD into the new board. Started out just using old desktop boards; the N100 was the first purpose-bought board, and also the most complicated upgrade, because it added UEFI. There definitely are projects out there that don't have an arm option, so something x86 is more flexible.

[–] linkinkampf19@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Holy moly. Yeah that's an exhaustive list :P

I don't see myself going that far, but again you didn't either. The Jellyfin/PiHole/HA/OctoPrint is kinda my current scope, but who knows what other options I'll look into. Having the overhead would always be nice. Although Immich is tempting now as ditching as much Google stuff is also on the horizon (I can't even think of getting rid of Gmail just yet, but it is inevitable).

Curious, what's your typical idle/load power draw? I think I'm comfy with up to 40-50w on load (my Ryzen 7700 is 65w TDP), although the less impact on ever increasing bills would be nice.

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[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

HAOS has add-ons to run a sort of managed version I think of pihole. Good start for containers.

RAID0 is not RAID, because R stands for redundant and RAID0 has dependency on as many drives are in the machine. You need to change that. One drive fails you lose everything.

The question is pertinent to my interests and the answer is to spend some time learning about the benefits and disadvantages of chipsets and processors unfortunately.

[–] linkinkampf19@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago

Ah crap, I was wrong on that. I have it in RAID1. My bad, I've corrected my OG post.

[–] Brewchin@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I was hosting most of my Docker stuff on my Synology DS920+, use Docker in a Pi 4B for AdGuard Home and WireGuard, and found myself wanting to use Home Assistant.

Can't use Docker for HA if you want HACS (addons) and Synology decided to kill USB drivers some time back, so looked around for options. Considered a Nabu Casa Yellow with a CM5 compute module (for Voice PE) and its price was more than a GMKtek N150 NUC, which has far higher specs and enough headroom for other things. So I got the NUC.

First thing I did was nuke Windows and replaced it with Proxmox, then installed Home Assistant OS (HAOS) as a VM in it. Plenty of headroom left, so now it's also got a Linux VM, a few LXCs, etc. (The Proxmox Helper Scripts site makes it very easy).

Could easily install AGH or PiHole and a bunch of other things on it. Think it's the best bang for buck thing I've bought in years.

[–] linkinkampf19@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah the HA Docker ish is the one thing I got concerned about, as I already needed to install HACS to integrate my Govee lights into it. For now, I'm also looking at the HA Voice Preview for voice integration, as I'm sick of having my shitty Google Homes all around unable to handle simple requests (like failing to turn on/off lights).

As much as I want to nuke Windows on my main rig, I try to play a lot of VR (especially heavily modded SkyrimVR), and after getting those games tweaked just right, it'd be quite the hit to me if I had to redo all of that again.

Genuinely interested in ProxMox tho, as if I can run all systems in their individual containers (a la Docker w/o the HACS issue) on one main device with a low power overhead, I'm all ears.

The NUC def seems like the best option, although from an earlier replay of mine, I'm still looking into seeing how far I can take the Pi4. MicroSD cards are still far less pricey than a new system after all.

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[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I got an old Lenovo P330 Xeon with 64 G of ECC ram. I recently checked its power usage for another poster asking the same thing. I was shocked to see it only use 15Watts while streaming 4k hevc.

For server use, ECC is important because it's going to be on 24/7 for years at a time.

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

For business, ECC is definitely required. I really don't see it needed for home use.

I've never run it for home boxes - I've had a Windows domain at home since the 90's using desktop hardware and it's as stable as any SMB I've seen running on enterprise-grade hardware.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I switched to ECC only for my home server over 10 years ago after a silent ram error corrupted some data on my raid drives. I didn't realize there was a problem until I went to look at an old photo and it was corrupted.

"8 percent of the DIMMs saw correctable error per year"

And this was from 20 years ago when memory density was much less so the chance of an error was lower.

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

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[–] linkinkampf19@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Oh wow. Yeah, I have an old server hand-me-down from a friend, and his first red flag with it was it was gonna pull down $50 more power monthly 0_o. I may look into this. I have a few old cases lying about, but I was looking from in the super small form factor as I could nestle it in my network cabinet.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

It depends on how old. My Xeons are e-2224G. They're 14nm coffee lake. They are rated at 71Watts but as I said only use 15w streaming 4k.

They're $190 on eBay with 16gb ram and 256 GB SSD.

A 16 GB Pi5 is $130 just for the motherboard. You still need storage, case and power supply.

[–] q7mJI7tk1@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Perhaps not the size you're after, but I have a HP Z1 G5, i9-9900, 5 SSD, 3 HDD, and that can idle as low as 45W and costs me £60/yr in electric. I managed to pick it up off eBay for only £260 (discounted from £350; if you keep an eye on certain things, sellers drop prices to rid of their gear).

[–] linkinkampf19@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Yeah, definitely beyond my needs. I actually have a hand-me-down server a friend gifted me, and that is well beyond what I need, plus power costs in the $50+/mo realm. Certainly not a bad price for that type of performance. Sure, it would be cool to have a centralized system that can do everything, but outside of my initial thoughts of using this setup for 4-5 low-power things, the cost is too great to consider. Thanks for your input nonetheless!

[–] cRazi_man@europe.pub 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I started with a 2 bay Synology NAS (still have this as storage only and no computing) and added a 12the gen i5 mini PC I got on eBay for £230. That's worked out great and I would highly recommend it. If you're on a budget then look for some older hardware.

Docker is also not that difficult to get started with and worth messing around with to learn. I started on with Docker on my Synology and out grew that quickly and have been really happy with my mini PC.

[–] linkinkampf19@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

So I couldn't use Docker on my Synology as it wasn't compatible, but I did try to try to use Docker, but it was most definitely a test install trying to squeeze Jellyfin and HA onto an 8GB card... yeah that didn't work (I didn't try too hard). I've heard of Docker Desktop, but sounds like it was not well received.

[–] cRazi_man@europe.pub 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I've heard of Docker Desktop, but sounds like it was not well received.

Don't know what this means. Docker is universally loved and works perfectly on desktop OSs.

I'm running Debian on my server mini PC. Docker will work on any installation of Windows, Linux, etc and work perfectly well. I played around with it initially by setting up a virtual machine with Debian on my gaming computer and seeing if I could get Docker apps working.

Fast forward to now, and I'm kinda sad that my server is all set up and stable and I have nothing to tinker with.

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