Hey guys, I’m new to self-hosting; I’m trying to set up cloud storage to store pics and other content. However, I’m unsure whether to use my old computer, Buy NAS or ResberryPie to set up a home server.
Also, what is the best privacy-friendly OS to use with the home server?
Lastly, do’s and don’ts.
Any help would be appreciated (:
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The Raspberry Pi can work if you don’t need a lot of space or high performance. You will need an external drive or two for it. The power consumption will be very low too.
You can use an old PC if you need more drives. Just don’t use an old gaming PC since the power consumption will be rather high.
You can always just undervolt the cpu and take out the gpu. Sure, a 1000w power supply is going to be inefficient at 20% draw, but if you already have old hardware it isn’t always cost effective to replace it just because of a higher power draw.
Also the pi is great for stuff like dns and network storage, but it’s going to struggle with transcoding as a media server. I can’t speak for the 5 from personal experience, but the 4 was completely incapable as a jellyfin/plex server. I just use an old stripped down computer for media and the pi is relegated to dns adblocking.
For real time transcoding, you will need a PC with a newer CPU that supports hardware H.265 encoding.
Do you mean 12-bit? Because previous versions have been supported since 2015-2016.
I would still consider an 8 year old CPU to be fairly recent considering performance has only increased a couple percent per generation.
12 bit video is uncommon, so support for it is not really needed. Intel Skylake or newer will work for 8 bit H.265.
If you have any video in 10 bit H.265, you will need a Kaby Lake or newer CPU in order to decode it in hardware. Software H.265 decoding will limit it to 1 or 2 streams depending on the CPU and video quality.