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.
I use RPi 4 2Gb for Pi-Hole.
Just retired a broken 8th gen intel i3 laptop used for Jellyfin. Its replacement is a GMKTec G3 N100. 4 core 4 thread, single channel SDRAM, but 12th gen Intel which is capable of a wider range of encoding & transcoding. Came with 8Gb ram and 256GB Nvme. Cost Less than £100 on ebay. Jellyfin installed ontop of Debian & very pleased with it.
Currently running Truenas scale with smb shares to service local network.
Additionally VPN on router provides access to home network.
I have a few redundant Rpi’s sitting about now as I’ve consolidated and will be using more NUC/ MiniPC hardware in future. They’re just better value at the moment for me.
Not looked at HA seriously yet, but its part of the plan
Yeah, most units I’m looking at now are of the 16GB/512GB flavor, as while that should be plenty of overhead for the time being, I’m wondering if 32GB is the better way to go to give even more buffer and cache space traded off with a smidge more upfront cost. I hope to eventually repurpose the Pis with something else, or donate them to my school’s tech program (yay DoE crumbling :( ), as I currently have one of my RPi4s running Steam Link for my housemate. Freeing up the other Pi4 and the Pi3B+ for other things would be great.