Would you recommend to use a RPi 5 or a second hand Lenovo mini pc (i3 6100t, 8gb ram) or something else?
Raspberry Pi 5 exists?
Oh neat! https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/
For two years, yes.
depends on what you want it to do.
Mini PC. Beelinks with the N100 chip are absolute beasts at doing video encoding at low power.
Almost a year of S12 mini as services/HTPC. Cant be happier!
I also recommend Beelink. I’ve been running an eqr6 (ryzen) for almost a year and it’s been awesome.
I use a retired business laptop. 16GB RAM and Linux, mapped some shares from my NAS. Low power high performance.
I’ve have amazing luck with both Beelink and Minisforum computers. They’re relatively cheap and excellent quality.
I personally use the Beelink ME Mini and it’s been able to handle just fine about any server tasks I need it to, not to mention the wildly expandable storage.
Beelink ME Mini
Would something like this be suitable as a NAS + Jellyfin + Home Assistant box?
That is exactly what I use mine for and it does it pretty much silently.
The Mini PC would be a lot easier. The RPi needs things to be built for ARM, and not everything is. The RPi is also slower and isn’t repairable.
RPis are great for many things, but generic home servers aren’t one of them, unless you really need clustering for some reason (like, a Ceph cluster).
I bought a generic N150 based minipc for a firewall & router (running OPNsense), and repurposed an old desktop PC as a server to host immich, paperless, nextcloud, etc… I considered both RPi and mini pc for the server, but I needed a few TB of storage and wanted redundancy. Spinny disks were a much more affordable option than SSDs, and minipcs and Rpis tend to not have much space for those drives. You can add on storage to them, but then they just become clunkier and more expensive than the old PC I already had laying around. Power consumption is probably a few watts higher on the PC than a Pi would be, but it’s not terrible.
That’s why I went the direction I did. I’m 3 about or 4 months in, and it’s been solid so far.
I’d probably go for a mini PC, like one from System76. It does have Linux on it (Pop_OS!), but I think you could manage with that in particular.
A 35W i7-7700T mini PC from 2017 will absolutely spank a modern N150 in single and multi–threaded applications, and uses very little extra power to do so.
Mini PC is the way to go.
I love my micros.
I have those exact micros and that exact keyboard
100% this. And Lenovos and HPs designed for the business market generally are a pleasure to work on (in the hardware sense) if you need, with good manuals and secondhand spare parts.
Oh for sure. I’ve got a handful of SFFs and mini PCs making up my little “homelab”:
(Yes, that’s the furnace. No, it’s not hot there. Ever. I’ve checked on it many, many times.)
I’ve also got another pair of Optiplex 9020s, an Optiplex 3040, and my old trusty HP Elite 8100 SFF w/8300 SFF mobo, i7-3770/32GB, and modded BIOS that supports booting from NVMe (via it.s M.2 PCIe card). Those are sitting in the closet just taking up space at the moment.
eBay supplied the 7050 and the mini PCs. My sister gave me the other Optiplexen from her work office.
That shelf sag scares me, sir. At least reinforce each layer with a slab of plywood or something.
The shelf is fine, it was like that when I bought it (new). But I am definitely considering reinforcement.
Mini PC
Overwhelming majority of my servers are tiny/mini/micros.
Is it going to be a general purpose file server? A media server through jellyfin, etc.? If a media server, do you need to transcode?
NAS, perhaps apps like vaultwarden, nextcloud, immich, maybe grafana for sensors… I am not 100% sure as this would be the first.
If you want something more capable that will handle more experimentation, go for the mini PC. If you know exactly what you want to host and you want to prioritize low power consumption, the pi might be a better choice.
I just repurposed one of our older PCs for that task. Slap Ubuntu on it, install webmin, and you’re set up.
What is webmin, i’ve never heard of it?
Linux server administration tool, web interface based. Makes managing servers way easier.
Thanks!
I’m running a home space with jellyfin and navidrome on a Pi5. Until now it’s been perfectly fine playing local and normally streaming to a single device at a time. The online support and off the shelf peripheries for troubleshooting the pi is also great!
I went to plug a 5TB drive into the pi the other day and it unmounted the SSD that was already plugged in. To me this is a sign that it is not build to handle more rigorous tasks (e.g. streaming to multiple devices, whilat performing a back up).
I probably won’t be swapping the system anytime soon, but I would go for a refurbed mini PC if I could go back in time.
Thanks for the feedback! Had similar problems with a raspberry pi. It cannot deliver enough power to the hdd, so it kept rebooting the drive.
Use whatever you have lying around when you start and then when you need new hardware for a certain purpose you can buy it going with the system requirements of that software.
