RPi Alternatives for Self-hosting
Here is the thing, I have 4 RPi’s of different generations (all the way from Zero W to 4B 4GB) that I use to host services at home for personal use.
Lately, I have realized I am running out of RAM to host more services, not to mention not enough switch ports to connect to.
Now I know the obvious solution is to get a more powerful setup (maybe a thin client) but electricity isn’t cheap and I am not particularly in the best shape financially speaking to shell out $300+ on a decent client to host my services.
Any suggestions?
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I upgraded my Plex and *arr server (i3 nuc) with a beelink 12i N100 based mini pc and could not be happier. $167 with 512gb nvme and 16gb RAM. It pulls 6W peak power
Where do people find equipment this cheap? Ya’ll are mind blowing with your ability to score things for such low prices.
Any links?
I'll recommend the EQ12 instead. Comes with DDR5 and 2x2.5Gb NICs. When on sale it's ~$200.
Exactly my setup. 2x EQ12 with 32 GB RAM and a standalone network for my Proxmox Cluster. Nice little things.
I've been doing computer stuff for a long time and now I have a really dumb question... what's the benefit of 2x NICs?
In case you don't have a 2.5gb switch and you daisy chain to a NAS or something?
You can use it as a firewall/router or a VPN gateway and even slap a wireless NIC or two on there and make it a combo router/AP, which can simultaneously play and transcode video as a Plex/Jellyfin server with zero hit to networking performance.
Well I'm no network engineer either but I think the most common use is a VLAN but I believe you can also just connect both to get 5Gb/s.
It looks like it regularly goes on sale that cheap on Amazon, at least in my region:
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0BVFS94J5
Is Plex doing any transcoding? That 6w peak is Pi Zero territory! Wow.
Hardware transcoding is highly efficient. The downside is sometimes it introduces artifacting in low resolution live TV.
With Intel QSV enabled it should be able to transcode like 4-6 1080p streams IIRC. Quicksync is very impressive hardware acceleration.
With hardware support enabled it can live transcode four 1080p streams, which my old NUC (5th Gen i3) could also do. The GPU on the NUC could not handle 4k, so it would fall back to using the CPU which would not keep up with a live stream.
The N100 can transcode one 4k HDR with Atmos 7.1 audio and stream in real time. It was just a test, there was a bit of a stutter as it settled in, but I think that might be due to the drive enclosure being connected via USB, so it was storage bandwidth rather than CPU/GPU. The USB ports on the computer are 3.2 gen 2, but the enclosure is only 3.0 at 5Gb/s.
It’s a 6W TDP CPU, but not 6W for power consumption.
At full tilt it’ll be about 25-30W, but typically it’s around 10W for me.
Ah, that makes a lot more sense.
Was wondering what magic was happening to get 6w peak.
Still, 30w peak is pretty nice, especially if you're idling at 10w.
Hi! Could you please indicate how you manage the system on the beelink? Base OS, how you deal with storage , containers or VMs?
Thanks in advance!!!
Base os is Ubuntu, Plex Media server is installed via apt from Plex repo, *arr services (lidarr, sonarr, radarr, bazaar, sabnzbd) all run on containers which I manage in a docker compose file. Media storage is an external, 4 bay SATA enclosure attached via USB. 4 six terrabyte disk drives in raid 6 on lvm/md, plus a 4tb SSD which is stand alone storage, formatted as btrfs.