Hi friends. I’m a newbie in self-hosting, though I’ve been managing (virtual) linux servers at work for a couple of years. I’m completely ignorant on the hardware choices out there, hopefully you can point me to the right direction.
Here are my requisites:
- Low power consumption, I plan to have it connected 24/7 and I’m kinda concerned on how much it will impact the electricity bill
- Ethernet port, preferably gigabit but whatever
- Graphical performance is not important as I don’t plan to connect it to any display. As long as I can ssh into it, I’m good.
Services I plan on installing, for starters:
- casaOS
- pi-hole, or equivalent
- Home Assistant
- Kitchen Owl (nice to have)
- Paperless-ngx (nice to have)
I live in europe and my budget is around 80 euros or so. Thanks in advance!
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Risking sounding like a broken record, I always suggest Tiny/Mini/Micro 1L form factor office PCs. Lenovo, Dell, and HP all create ultra small office PCs that make great low power servers. A Pi will use 5-9w at idle, while these PCs will use 11-13w idle. They also use more standard components such as NVME drives, 2.5" drives, and replaceable RAM. Easy to find under $100 USD used, I’m sure you can find them under 100 euro.
Bonus: there is a literally endless supply of used x86 SFF hardware from large institutions, so unlike SBC’s, there’s no special, weird supply chain managed by an English educational nonprofit that could just suddenly decide to not sell to the public for years at a time.
could you please elaborate? what is SFF hardware?
SFF = Small Form Factor. It’s smaller than traditional ATX computers but can still take the same RAM, processors and disks. Motherboards and power supplies tend to be nonstandard however. Idle power consumptions are usually very good.
USFF = Ultra Small Form Factor. Typically a laptop chipset + CPU in a small box with an external power supply. Somewhat comparable with SBCs like Raspberry Pis. Very good idle power consumption, but less powerful than SFF (and/or louder due to smaller cooler) and often don’t have space for standard disks.
SBC = Single Board Computer.
Hi, sorry I just saw this. “SFF” is short for “small form factor.” It’s just industry jargon for “a small PC.” They tend to be designed to use less power which makes them a good fit for home servers. Pretty much any line of PC sold to businesses, like Dell Optiplex or HP EliteDesk, will have small form factor variants.
We buy the HP Pro/Elitedesk 1L pcs as backup servers and attach storage.
Works pretty good and they are pretty cheap with the power they can provide.Good point.
The Pi Zero is 2w max… It’s downside is it draws 2w MAX. Power is power, only so much you can do in 2w. As you pointed out, the 4 and 5 can do more, because they can draw more, (or they draw more so can do more, it’s all related).
The key seems to be ability to minimize the idle power while still capable of ramping up to something useful when you need it - like the micros you’ve listed.
Try a used laptop. Cheap, power efficient, built in UPS, small. Can be quite powerful and some are even upgradable
Dammit, I have a few of those, you’re killing my excuse to buy a new toy!
Let me help you with that: what if you need more power? or what if you need something smaller due to size constraints or maybe what if the old battery can’t handle 24/7?. Pick one!
Even has a KVM for emergency access ;)
absolutely this.
As a point of reference regarding power consumption:
I’ve been running a desktop non-stop for the last ten years (built as a gaming rig) as a file/media server, so it’s probably the worst thing you can run this way, power-wise. Has an 800 watt power supply, running windows.
I’ve done the math many times, costs me about $1/day in power at mostly idle.
Just presenting a worst-case example as a guideline.
I’ve recently spun up a Raspberry Pi Zero W for PiHole, DHCP, DNS, Tailscale, Joplin and Bitwarden. It’s maximum power draw is TWO WATTS. Haha
Currently running a watt meter on the desktop, should have some decent actual numbers from it soon, but can’t imagine idle is any less than 50 watts.
So there’s two extremes. Don’t be me (looks like you aren’t!)
Edit: I wouldn’t recommend the Zero W for this, it’s underpowered. I’m already overloading it with just PiHole and Tailscale, honestly.
Yeah same. I have several machines that whirrr all the time. The power cost and usage is fairly negligible. The real costs in the house are appliances. OP will save more energy by getting a more power efficient fridge or dishwasher than worry about a computer being on in the closet
Throwing in my own data, I have a small server rack at home that runs a brocade icx4630 switch and dell r720, idles around 250w. My desktop setup, monitors, amp, computer itself etc idles around 200w.
Oof. Maybe my power is worse than I thought!
Adding my data as well:
My server is diy desktop pc - mbo MSI Z270-A PRO with celeron G3930 and 16GB RAM, 3x SSD on 550W PSU, idles at 23W. After adding another 3.5" HDD consuption went up to 34W. 34W in Ctoatia is around 34€ a year.
Some SFF PCs are at 10-15W. SBCs like rpi should be below 10 W, but dont think you can get anything new for 80€
Pi Zero could be underpowered but the bigger pi’s sound like a perfect match. I would recommend looking into a used pi 3 or 4, because the pi 5 is new and always out of stock (at least in europe) so you pay around 150$.
Libre Computer “Le Potatoe” is a inexpensive solid performing SBC.
Look into a NUC on ebay. I was able to snag a new 11th Gen i3 for 200 eur. Power draw is about 7w with a headless Debian. Running a media server, nextcloud, pihole, an arr stack and I’m planning to add home assistant and a zigbee bridge which I now run on a pi.
If you aren’t planning to run to much on it a rpi4or5 will actually be enough and these things can draw 15 on absolute max load.
Wow, 7w. And has real horsepower unlike RPi.
Im really impressed with the thing. Cpu idles at 30C as well. Very similar to rpi4 with 5 times the performance.
I have an Intel NUC I got on eBay for £50. It’s running 30 containers, 10W draw
Lenovo m900 tiny. Low cost and power.
They’re also surprisingly easy to upgrade for their size. Swapped RAM, CPU, and hard drive in about 15 minutes total on one of mine.
Think centre tiny gang rise up :-) !
I second Lenovo tiny. I have 3 x m920q with a gigabit switch and total combined power draw is about 53w
A raspberry pi or orange pi could definitely run all of those things at very low power consumption.
Any Intel NUC(the small 4x4 ones) 8th gen or forward will fit the bill.
HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini (or equivalent)? You can get them for pretty cheap on eBay.
Hey fellow european!
Tinytronics.nl -> Pi4 model B 8GB: 87€ and in stock. The 4GB model is 68€. They also have orange Pi for a higher budget.
Kiwi-electronics.com -> Pi 4 model B, 4GB? 63€. They also have all the pi accessories you could want.
If you are going to use paperless for important documents, and if you want to not lose data for sure, get a 1TB cheap HDD or something and a USB3.0 adapter. SD cards will eventually fail.
Otherwise, get an old used laptop 2nd hand. I used an old HP probook G1 laptop for about a year for my server. It didn’t use much power at all.
A cheap android box + armbianOs is also an option if you’re looking for low power. I have a 7watt one that’s running 24/7 for the last few years.
Have a look at the ServeTheHome site and channel on youtube … he’s done a load of good reviews of AliExpress devices and some tiny/mini/micro devices (think thinclients)
He covers power consumption and some interesting points (like which recent multi-Gb NICs are supported by pfSense / Proxmox / etc)
Just watching those should at least help you decide what you need.
I was going to build my own virt server and I ended up with a low power, silent, passively cooled box to run all my VMs in… for much cheap.
@pathief I think what you are looking for is intel n100 since it only uses like 6-watt TDP, but before jumping to that, you should look at Heaven video. If you only want to run for a year or two, maybe the older CPU is much better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PisIPpbMkTc
I hope you found what you are looking for.
This. I did extensive research and will get myself a n100 or n200 for my on-prem server. Itcaps out at 16 GB ram, but I’ll survive. N305 has 3x the power consumption as n200 at around 15W. Asrock even has a mITX mobo for the n100. And its fanless!
RPI5 would be the other obvious choice, but it’s impossible to get a hold of.
Edit: Also, check out this thread: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/2340730
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=PisIPpbMkTc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Not to state the obvious one, but there’s always the Raspberry Pi.
The supply has gotten better on those, so you can probably pick one up in your price range, and the power draw is super minimal.
Raspberry Pi was my first choice, but apparently I can’t even back order it :/
Alternatively, there are also some options from pine64.com, maybe scroll through there! Same for odroid.nl
Shout out for ODROID, their product revision cycles take too long (lmao why are they still selling a 32-bit chip that was an iffy investment back in 2013), but when they drop new stuff, it tends to be great.
That reminds me, I do own a pine64 device! It was the first thing I got on Kickstarter.
It’s a Pine A64, with 2gb RAM. I wonder if it has enough power to run all those things. It’s a budget device from 8 years ago, probably gonna have a hard time but I’ll give it a try if I manage to find it!
Very nice! I am running an HC4 (I think; the toaster) now since last month and so far, it’s running much better than I thought! So yes, check that one first, then see if you have to upgrade and if you do, go for aarch64 or traditional x64 but not 32 bit arm
If it’s been a while since you checked, it’s worth checking again. RPi has been becoming more available over the last month or two, and I was able to get one of the new RPi 5!
Someone put together a great locator tool
In my country pi4 8GB ram with PSU 130€ and then you need SD card and/or SSD
My whole “homelab” is made of either things I literally found in the trash, hand-me downs and 2nd part stuff I got for extremely cheap. It’s no speed deamon, but it’s got 8cores, 16GB ram and gigabit… What I’m trying to say is, that is most likely also an option for you and there is no reason to buy the latest and greatest of hardware for running simple things like pi-hole. As for the electricity bill, unless you’re running something computationally intensive 24/7 or just a ton of hard drives, I wouldn’t worry about it.
