MiniPC home server recommendations
Hello Tildes!
I've been trying out a lot of open-source apps these past few months but I've always hosted them on a VPS. It's been great and educational so far. However, I started considering to host my very own server on-prem so that my data is absolutely physically with me and nowhere else.
With that short intro, I'd like to say I'm in the market for a home server. I can install OS's, docker containers, etc. And that's how I managed to install Jellyfin, Immich, Paperless, Portainer, etc on my VPS right now.
What out-of-the-box miniPC can be good for someone dipping their toes in the home server scene? I feel like I might need the storage to be extendable somehow? And it must be able to stream music and video through Jellyfin.
The choices in YouTube videos are overwhelming that I keep jumping from saying "ooh I'll get that" to "oh wait maybe I'll get that other one".
I also am not very handy in terms of hardware so I would prefer something out-of-the-box (if possible). Maybe a max budget of 500? But around 400 euros would be preferred. (Edit: In EU also, if possible)
Thanks for reading! Hope to hear from you guys!
I say look no further than an Intel NUC. This one here should fit your preferred budget, but if you can I'd spring for a version with 16Gb of RAM.
I'm using one myself. It runs Jellyfin, Pihole, HomeAssistant, Unifi (and its DB), caddy, deluge, headscale (server), tailscale (client), headscale-admin, a wiki, and SFTPGo.
Hey thanks for the quick reply! I found it in EU as well. Seems good!
Mini PCs and similar hardware tend to be a lot cheaper if you buy them directly from the source, which may be helpful here: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008517116643.html
That's actually just the first result I found for the same CPU as the Amazon link, too, so may well not be the absolute best price - but hopefully it gives the idea of what's worth searching for (the AliExpress search function is utterly terrible, I have no idea how it's not in their interests to improve it, but it does tend to be worth spending 20 minutes fighting with it once you know what you're looking for).
That said, if you're looking for expandable storage the NUC/mini PC form factor might not be ideal - something prebuilt in a case like the Jonsbo N4 that you can slap some 3.5" spinning disks into could also be a good bet.
Also seconding @JXM's recommendation for Serve the Home, they're great at covering exactly this area so even if you don't find precisely what you're looking for in their videos, you're likely to get a decent idea of what's out there and what's possible from watching a few.
[Edit] An AMD machine with similar performance to the Intel 1220P but in a fairly generic four-bay NAS case: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008784673114.html
[Edit 2] There are also some decent options out there using the Ryzen 9 7940HS in a similar price range, which is a good bit faster than the one I linked above, but I could only see mini PC form factor or ITX motherboard/CPU combos. If it were me I'd probably go for the latter plus the Jonsbo case, but that does mean you'd need to put it together yourself (along with adding RAM, storage, and a power supply).
AliExpress is a big risk. If the mini PC is defective or damaged in transit (more likely via de minimis style shipping?) you will be left holding the bag due to cost prohibitive return shipping (at least from US perspective).
Can’t speak for the current US situation, but from the UK at least they offer free returns for anything defective, and I’m reasonably sure they’re required to do the same in the EU.
For what it’s worth I’ve bought four full mini PCs/small servers, quite a few network cards, a bunch of more specialist boards (PCIe retimers, USB4 bridge chips, etc.), and an absolute ton of general hardware like T-nuts, bolts, and joining plates from there over the last year or two and had zero issues. I’ve also noticed they’ve really picked up on shipping in the last six months or so - I’m regularly getting things in hand within 5 days of ordering now.
Not to say my experience is guaranteed to be representative, but it’s literally been more reliable for me than Amazon, going on numbers alone.
I double the Used Intel NUC i have a 6 node cluster ive been using for 5 years 0 problems. You can find them on ebay for around $100-$200 each. (Avoid the special models, just look for the plain square shaped ones.) Even a 10 year old one has several times the power of a raspberry pi.
Protip: the NUCs have fine grain power control in the bios and they despite being more powerful use the same or less power than a pi if you tweak them down.
I've been running a home server for a decade now (first turnkey NAS boxes like WD and Synology and then an Unraid server).
If you're just starting out and want to experiment, I'd suggest something like a Dell Mini or HP G series. They're those tiny computers that every office has a million of. They are all extremely common and because of that dirt cheap used. Even a five year old one of those will be enough to run the basics and get started.
I'd also suggest checking out the Serve the Home YouTube channel. They do a lot of technical videos about high end server components that cost more than a car, but they also do a great job of covering lower end stuff that normal people can afford. They have a running series about the "1 Liter PC". That might be a good place to start.
Lastly, if you're going to be using Plex or Jellyfin, I would suggest getting a PC with an Intel processor. Almost all mainstream Intel processors have built in GPU transcoding that Plex and Jellyfin can use to transcode/process video without using up all the CPU cycles. Plex doesn't support AMD processors/GPUs for acceleration at all and Jellyfin's AMD support isn't 100% mature yet.
I'm happy to answer any more specific questions if you have any.
Seconded. Dell and Lenovo retailers are everywhere. The only catch is that you have to use Facebook Marketplace to find them... Yech!
I found one on eBay. Is a refurbished Dell Optiplex 7070 Mini PC with an i3-9100T processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD actually good value for 200 euro?
It’s not terrible value, but it’s roughly equivalent performance to the Intel N100, which is the baseline workhorse embedded CPU in a lot of small devices nowadays. The N100 is a lot more power efficient (13th gen embedded chip vs 9th gen desktop chip, with all the performance per watt advancements that brings) so I’d go for one of them if it were me - pricing on new N100 machines should be in line with or somewhat less than you’re seeing for the used 9100T, and you can probably find N100 machines used by now if you want to go even cheaper.
For comparison the 1220P mentioned above is 2-4x faster, and the 7940HS is 2-8x faster, depending on workload - but the N100 is a totally capable piece of hardware that you can get for very little money if you don’t actually need that speed. I’ve got a passively cooled one running lightweight stuff on Proxmox with no problem at all.
[Edit] Yeah if you're happy going used, I'm seeing N100/16GB/512GB boxes on eBay for the equivalent of about €100.
Thanks but they're twice the price on my eBay. XD The search continues I guess. :D
Haha fair enough! I’m actually seeing €130 brand new on Amazon in case that’s helpful. Not sure where you are in Europe, but I’m seeing the same deal when I arbitrarily checked France and Germany:
https://www.amazon.fr/TUREWELL-HSI-100-Lake-N100-visualizzazione/dp/B0DFWQTNJV/
https://www.amazon.de/TUREWELL-HSI-100-Lake-N100-Standard/dp/B0DFWQTNJV/
Yeah, only look local. You'll find a better deal than that out there, just keep looking.
Seconded for the HP G Series. Currently using a HP G4 with an 8th gen i5 as my Jellyfin server and it's given me no trouble.
Does Intel still have the issues with bad chips? Last year I was overwhelmed at all the options and prices and ended up getting a micro ATX form factor pc in a lian li a3 case and was very happy with the price. For a lot of the amd nucs that had nice specs and prices I kept seeing wildy different reviews saying they had issues randomly. It made me feel like it would be a 500 dollar gamble and I did not want to gamble with that much money.
Ultimately I ended up with AMD Ryzen 7 5700G (for the onboard GPU incase I wanted it) and 128 GB of ddr 4 ram since that's the max that chipset uses and is half price of ddr5 and not building a gaming rig so who cares on speed. Topped off with 2 tb nvme drive that was on sale, and decent mobo and powesupply, spent about 700 or so on it and am really happy with it. It is mich bigger than a mini itx bigger but part prices are cheaper, I can swap stuff if I need, and it's what I am familiar with. I want this to be a long term server in my house to play with as I want and felt another 200 was easily worth it.
But suggestions here are what I found when looking around for the minis, id just check if buying Intel CPU that you get one that doesn't slowly fry itself.
None of the chips that are in NUCs have the frying issue. Most important is to check that it's one with QuickSync support for transcoding. n100 or n150 or similar.
Along with the NUC minisforums has been decent for me. I have an MS-01 which is a probably waaaaay overkill for dipping your toe in it (sure is for me, but I also have some help to grow quickly on this), but they're another of the decent minipc land.
I will say that after Intel's massive debacle with chips in the last year, i'm kinda done with them and trying to stick to AMD just out of a "there are consequences for betraying trust" stance. I don't think that would have any effect on what you're trying to do, but someone smarter than me could check that.
I got a minisforum UN1290 with 32GB RAM and a i9-12900HK (14 cores) here. I'm running proxmox on it. I haven't had time to work with it lately (work's been burning me out by the end of the day), but also plan to build a Debian-based NAS with this, basically a Raspberry PI + 4 nvme slots. I'm actually looking to set up a file server, SFTP, and backups to Wasabi (cheap Amazon S3) so I can have a robust home setup with data. I have some experience in the datacenter space (mostly remote backup configurations/maintenance) so I'm hoping to put it to use. Veeam + Proxmox can be had for free, and Wasabi is something like $7/TB per month.
After VMware got bought by Broadcom and fucked up its licensing my company has had clients seriously consider, if not jump to Proxmox anyway.
I actually found this NVME NAS I really want, but want to give the pi a shot first. I figure if it doesn't work out i'll still have my data, and try to get stuff backed up (Raid1 local + cloud backup).
I like b2 over Wasabi. You pay for exactly what you use. No 90 day retention policy, no minimum storage charge. Upload one file to Wasabi and delete it? You're paying for it for 90 days, and if you're under 1 TB, you're paying $7/month for 3 months.
Yes there's api fees with b2, but there's a generous free api allotment, and api fees are substantially less than s3. I expect $5/Tb + api fees (if you out run the free api limits) to come out a fair bit cheaper than Wasabi.
I originally quite liked the look of that GMKtec machine for the price/size as well, but Jeff Geerling wasn’t impressed, and I’ve always got the impression he’s a pretty trustworthy voice on this kind of thing.
I've been running Intel NUC11TNHi3 for the past couple of years and I'm very happy with it, despite my storage situation not being ideal. It was a barebones system so I installed 16GB RAM, 512GB NVMe drive, and I'm using Unraid as the OS. I'm running qBittorrent, a few apps from the *arr suite, Plex, Tailscale, and some system related containers and plugins. I also ran Home Assistant for a couple of months with no issues. The CPU load hovers around 0-5%, with qBittorrent serving around a thousand torrents being the biggest culprit.
One thing I'd advise you to do is to decide beforehand what you will do with your data. NUC's are great, but the storage solutions that accompany them are not, at least as far as I know. If I knew what I know now, I would've either gotten a powerful enough NAS with proper drive bays, or build a system that can handle as much storage as I can fit into a case. If I'm not mistaken, based on my prior research that can now very well be outdated, your storage solution with NUCs are using external drives (which is what I do for my useless data), using a DAS which are almost as unreliable as the external solution since they also use USB, or using something like m2 to SATA adapter which introduces a whole bunch of problems (assuming they're reliable to begin with).
I was about to make a similar post so I guess I'll just post this in the comments here.
I'm kind of looking to consolidate some VPS stuff and some stuff I have running at home into one setup.
I see people online doing raspberry pi clusters. Would that be a stupid way to do this or should I just go with a mini-pc type of thing? I have 2 Pi5's (one running jellyfin, the other not doing anything) that I'd gotten as part of another larger project, and an old 1L pc (intel i5-6500t) that I could throw at this.
Basically my wife has some old wordpress blogs that she's been paying to host for years and its time to either let them die or self host them. So I want to do some sort of setup that would run those blogs, a minecraft server, jellyfin, homeassistant... maybe one other little project... basically just consolidate a bunch of little thing I have running on dedicated machines or VPS's (that I'm paying for). Is there a good way to do this?
I currently run a Pi 4 with 3 USB SSDs for a pi.hole, wireguard VPN, freshRSS instance, jellyfin, samba server (for my kodi box, a Pi 5, and music management), occasional minecraft server hosting, and some other bits and bobs.
Honestly, it works very well. Ideally I'd like to upgrade to something with RAID for redundancy in the future, and give myself a little more room for media (even my current 8TB setup is getting a little tight). But I've been slowly growing and improving this setup for 5 years now. It was an excellent place to start, and I've learned a while lot, especially about home networking and DNS snafus.
IMO if you have someplace to toss that 1L PC and it has room for a few disks, I would invest in a couple of 4TB HDDs, install unraid, and start experimenting. It should be more than adequate for everything you want to do. The only reason I don't use an old desktop PC like that is because I live in a tiny apartment where space and fan noise would make a full desktop PC annoying, and I wanted to experiment with a lower power ARM setup.
A single Pi 5 can likely handle everything you're thinking of, if you're willing to occasionally wait for slow tasks and you're OK investing in USB SSDs or an M.2 HAT. But if you have the PC already, might as well use it!
1L is short for 1 litre. They're smol...
Are you using proxmox or something like that, or are you just running a few services on each pi?
All on one pi. In my experience, people drastically overestimate the computing power they need... and underestimate what even a pi 4 is capable of. My 4 rarely gets toasty hot, passively cooled in a flirc case, and typically uses 25% CPU or less unless I'm doing something like re-scanning media in jellyfin.
If you are just dipping your toes, I might suggest starting with a NAS rather than a NUC plus attached storage. I have a Synology DS220+ and after a $10 RAM upgrade, it does a lovely job running a full *arr stack plus some other goodies.
But since it has the storage as well, I don't have to worry about mounting volumes, etc.-- it's all on the same low-power device.
The DS220+ has a Celeron J4025, which supports QuickSync and thus Jellyfin transcoding. Jellyfin can easily stream to three devices in my house at once with transcoding, no sweat.
Cons:
My docker configs in case it's helpful in the future: https://github.com/sethkinast/synology-config/
backmarket.com is another resource I can recommend if you will consider refurbished PCs. They are based in France I think so they should have EU support. I like their low prices, quick support, and 1 year warranty (for the US).
I know you are asking for mini PC, but I would suggest getting older workstation (or desktop client - midi-case though, not just thin client) from Dell, HP or alike.
These may be proprietary inside (motherboards, power supplies), but they have all you need - physical place for storage (HDDs), cables routed in many cases and they also have powerful enough and often 80 Plus Gold power supply. I'd look for something with PCIe x16 (physical) slot if you wanted to hrow in some low power GPU for on-the-fly reencoding. This PC with used GTX1050 would likely cost you under 200€ and the rest of your budget can go into storage (buying new HDDs).
I run ATX motherboard with i5-4xxx (yes, 10 generations old) CPU, scraped 8GB of RAM (from.other PCs), my own used GTX750, new Seasonic PSU and 3x 4TB new HDDs. It drwas around 50W idling and goes up to 100W when heavily loaded.
https://a.co/d/9PFxHpd
I bought this when it was around $200, looks like it's even cheaper now. Absolutely great deal for someone like me just running some basic stuff like Jellyfin (only for ourselves at home), 3d printer software, and various file management shares.
It's not a powerhouse but it does everything I need it to and draws incredibly low power.
/offtopic(?) but adjacent
Anyone have minimal MiniPC (or SFFPC build) recommendations purely for UHBR20 remote desktop streaming? I want to access my 4K120Hz HDR virtual display over Moonlight without DSC and don't need any other functionality, I pretty much only need gigabit + DP2.1 + enough decoding power.