Hi!
I have an old gaming pc (i5 9400F) with 16gb of ram that has been acting as my home server with proxmox. It’s quite large and quite loud and very overpowered for what I’m using it for (home assistant, Minecraft server, some lxc containers) and a mini pc (amd 5800h with 16gb ram).
I want to sell my gaming pc, place the HDD into a NAS (and samba share my plex library), and potentially grab a low powered N100 minipc to pick up the lxc containers and home assistant that my gaming pc is running.
New to self hosting so wondering if this is a good setup or if there are any glaring issues you see with this. What is your setup?
The n100 will make you sad eventually as your self-hosting addiction soars.
An older i5 with onboard gpu or an nvidia card will make you happier and not pull THAT much wattage.
Your Minecraft server will thank you.
Depends on what you’re doing.
If you want a low-power setup, get a shell with a backplane for 4 drives and an n100 board.
If you want to host games, get an AMD APU on a mini-itx and do the same.
Maybe a 20-40W difference, but the AMD is going to outperform the n100 like a hot knife through butter.
I agree with this, but would like to add for OP that diversifying is not always a bad idea.
I have a NAS that is mainly running as just a NAS with a few containers to help me download and categorize stuff. It has a AMD CPU, so no HW transcoding, so I added a N100 to host Jellyfin on the side. That little NUC can also run HA, Heimdall, PiHole, Tailscale or any lightweight container with ease. I do it with Proxmox LXC’s.
If I wanted to host game servers, I would probably build a server for that on its own anyways, just because it would be more power hungry and need modularity for future upgrades/changes.
I guess the point is that there is no «one server does it all» for me. I prefer to have servers more suitable for their tasks than having one beast doing everything alone. Makes it suck less when stuff breaks too.
Otherwise I think the comment above is on point.
Do you already have a NAS? You could go back to your original setup, but with a more efficient CPU and run it all on one box.
N100 devices are neat, but those CPUs are really slow. Running the rest of the computer, plus the inefficiency of the power brick does add up to the power usage/heat output. Consolidating into one efficiently tuned device can save a lot of power.
Aliexpress has some funky boards which are laptop CPUs soldered to an mATX motherboard, if you can find a nicely sized case you could maintain that all in one formfactor, but with the efficiency of a laptop. I have no experience with them, but they look cool and should do what you need. They’re essentially your mini pc but as an ATX board so you have expandability.
Yeah, I’ve been looking for a replacement for my NAS, which is currently my old PC (Ryzen 1700 w/ mATX board). But everything I’ve found either has poor performance (e.g. N100 devices), poor expandability (e.g. mini-PCs), or are way too expensive. So I stick w/ my ghetto NAS box for now.
I’d really love a smaller footprint, but I really don’t want to spend more than a couple hundred on it. I’ve upgraded our (SO and I) computers to mini-ITX, so I’ll probably end up upgrading the NAS once we upgrade one of our PCs. That way I’ll just need a case and maybe a PSU and I’m off to the races.
But if anyone has found any diamonds in the rough that are small, support at least 2 HDDs and 1 SSD (can be NVMe) for pretty cheap, I’m interested. I’d prefer 4 HDDs so I have an upgrade route, but in all honesty, I’ll probably end up replacing both HDDs instead of adding a second RAID.
funky boards which are laptop CPUs soldered to an mATX motherboard.
Expandability
Aren’t those mutual exclusive? Or is there a specific reason why they are directly soldered to the mainboard?
Soldered to a desktop motherboard, so you have pci express expandability. Throw in an HBA and you’ve got like total 12 data ports. Plus two ram slots for 96 gigs of ram (or more maybe?).
Changing the CPU is more upgradability. But there’s no point in upgrading when the only upgrade is an i7 to i9 with 0.2ghz faster speeds and worse efficiency.
Seems fine. I have an affordable NAS that mostly serves files and has a few containers, and a second server using one the Lenovo Tiny machines that has many more services and a lot more RAM. And it works well.
