Would you recommend to use a RPi 5 or a second hand Lenovo mini pc (i3 6100t, 8gb ram) or something else?
A 35W i7-7700T mini PC from 2017 will absolutely spank a modern N150 in single and multi–threaded applications, and uses very little extra power to do so.
Mini PC is the way to go.
I love my micros.
I have those exact micros and that exact keyboard
100% this. And Lenovos and HPs designed for the business market generally are a pleasure to work on (in the hardware sense) if you need, with good manuals and secondhand spare parts.
Oh for sure. I’ve got a handful of SFFs and mini PCs making up my little “homelab”:
(Yes, that’s the furnace. No, it’s not hot there. Ever. I’ve checked on it many, many times.)
I’ve also got another pair of Optiplex 9020s, an Optiplex 3040, and my old trusty HP Elite 8100 SFF w/8300 SFF mobo, i7-3770/32GB, and modded BIOS that supports booting from NVMe (via it.s M.2 PCIe card). Those are sitting in the closet just taking up space at the moment.
eBay supplied the 7050 and the mini PCs. My sister gave me the other Optiplexen from her work office.
That shelf sag scares me, sir. At least reinforce each layer with a slab of plywood or something.
The shelf is fine, it was like that when I bought it (new). But I am definitely considering reinforcement.
Mini PC. Beelinks with the N100 chip are absolute beasts at doing video encoding at low power.
I also recommend Beelink. I’ve been running an eqr6 (ryzen) for almost a year and it’s been awesome.
Almost a year of S12 mini as services/HTPC. Cant be happier!
Whatever is cheapest. When youre first starting out basically any hardware will do, it just needs to boot Linux. As you progress and find more stuff to put on the servers, you’ll discover what you’re real hardware needs are.
When I first started, it was a hand me down single core AMD Sempron machine (socket 754!) that I later upgraded to an Athlon64 and 4gb of DDR. I managed to bodge that poor thing into running a Minecraft 1.5.2 server.
Personally I would stick with the i3 machine since I am assuming it’s an office PC that can be had for cheaper than a Pi 5 (which is quite inflated in price IMO). x86 still retains better software support vs ARM and they are significantly easier to attach large cheap storage to via SATA. Power cost will be greater but I doubt an office i3 pulls more than 70w wall power at full load.
Thanks for the feedback! And yes, used mini pc can be found cheaper than rpi5, also comes with a proper cooling and housing, which would be extra for rpi.
The Mini PC would be a lot easier. The RPi needs things to be built for ARM, and not everything is. The RPi is also slower and isn’t repairable.
RPis are great for many things, but generic home servers aren’t one of them, unless you really need clustering for some reason (like, a Ceph cluster).
I just repurposed one of our older PCs for that task. Slap Ubuntu on it, install webmin, and you’re set up.
I would avoid a Raspi/ARM at all costs. But there is a third alternative: A x86 SBC like a Zima Board or blade might be exactly what you are looking for. Small, powerful enough and far easier than an ARM to maintain.
I bought a generic N150 based minipc for a firewall & router (running OPNsense), and repurposed an old desktop PC as a server to host immich, paperless, nextcloud, etc… I considered both RPi and mini pc for the server, but I needed a few TB of storage and wanted redundancy. Spinny disks were a much more affordable option than SSDs, and minipcs and Rpis tend to not have much space for those drives. You can add on storage to them, but then they just become clunkier and more expensive than the old PC I already had laying around. Power consumption is probably a few watts higher on the PC than a Pi would be, but it’s not terrible.
That’s why I went the direction I did. I’m 3 about or 4 months in, and it’s been solid so far.
I use a retired business laptop. 16GB RAM and Linux, mapped some shares from my NAS. Low power high performance.
Is it going to be a general purpose file server? A media server through jellyfin, etc.? If a media server, do you need to transcode?
NAS, perhaps apps like vaultwarden, nextcloud, immich, maybe grafana for sensors… I am not 100% sure as this would be the first.
I’ve have amazing luck with both Beelink and Minisforum computers. They’re relatively cheap and excellent quality.
I personally use the Beelink ME Mini and it’s been able to handle just fine about any server tasks I need it to, not to mention the wildly expandable storage.
Beelink ME Mini
Would something like this be suitable as a NAS + Jellyfin + Home Assistant box?
That is exactly what I use mine for and it does it pretty much silently.
depends on what you want it to do.
Raspberry Pi 5 exists?
Oh neat! https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/
For two years, yes.
If you want something more capable that will handle more experimentation, go for the mini PC. If you know exactly what you want to host and you want to prioritize low power consumption, the pi might be a better choice.
That depends on what you are running on it. The Pi 5 will be one of the most energy efficient options, but it’s limited to USB and PCIe 2.0 x1 with an adapter for storage.
If power consumption isn’t a huge deal, then an Intel-based Mini PC. This will allow you to do transcoding for streaming as well as any other more CPU-intensive task. It also gives you stellar USB 5Gb support which can be used for quite a large storage pool. I’m running a 5x 16TB ZFS pool on an Intel-based Lenovo mini PC. It’s in a multi-bay USB box. Unfortunately AMD’s pre-Zen 5 USB controllers aren’t reliable for this use case which is why I recommend Intel. Pre-Zen 5 AMD-based mini PCs might be OK with one disk per USB port, but as soon as you peg a USB port to its limit, you start running into USB resets.
