I’m moderately tech savvy, a little experience with most OS and comfortable with hardware. I’ve got some basic things working in Docker. I want to start self hosting my photo backup, Bitwarden, Jellyfish, Sonarr and Radarr, Pi hole, Home Assistant and replace Dropbox. But the more I dive into the hardware and setup the more muddled I’m finding myself.

I’m very concerned about power draw so the lower the consumption the better. I do want some parity, though I’m willing to I introduce that once it’s set up. I’m not particularly concerned with transcoding but I guess it’d be a nice bonus.

Is a QNAP alone valid? Or perhaps I’m better off with a Pi and my huge GDrive while I learn? Or a NUC with better transcoding capability? I want to access my data internally, stream content to a Chromecast with Google TV.

My instinct is both a NUC and a separate NAS but I’e love it if anyone has some insight.

Thanks!

  • @panicnow@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    Get a power measuring device if you don’t have one and consider the real cost of buying something new if you already have something. For instance, I have an older gaming laptop I am considering repurposing for my home automation stuff. While idling it draws about 10w which is amazing to me and a number I never would have guessed. For me that works out to (24 hours * 10w * 365 days* 1000w/Kw ) 87kwh per year. I pay about 10 cents per kwh so say $10 a year. Buying something to save a little power will never work out.

    My current home server is an intel NUC from 2013! It can’t do some of the things I would like to add on, but it is a great media server and downloader. Powerful hardware isn’t really a necessity.

    • JustEnoughDucksEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      As a comparison,

      Mine is a 2700X on a B450I with 2 HDDs and 1 NVMe drive at 40W idle. Add an Arc A380 and it idles at 60W. We pay 0.30€ per kWh, so that means to run my server it is 158€ per year without any video transcoding.

      Hardware was pretty cheap and it is over-powered, but I pay for it… hopefully getting solar soon!