Compact business desktops like others have mentioned are great. Depending on your needs, I also like using older or used laptops. They’re still power efficient if you get a recent processor model, people sell them for fairly cheap used, and sometimes having an attached keyboard and display is more convenient than having to hook up a crash cart
Go on eBay and look for “tiny” or USFF boxes. Dell, HP, and Lenovo make various models of 1L units that are commonly available. Just make sure to do some research on what the specific hardware capabilities are to make sure they satisfy your needs.
Source: my router is a Lenovo m920q tiny with an eBay dual SFP+ 10G NIC running pfSense 2.7.
Will second this idea. I've had good luck running low-use Samba servers on a Lenovo tiny model.
Thin clients are also solidly good as container hosts. I've used HP T630s and Wyse 5070s in place of RPis during the great pi shortage with good results. You know something is fucked when you can spend less money on a J5005 with 8gb RAM than you do on a Pi 4.
I've had good luck running more intensive loads on more recent models of these systems, say 3 to 5 gens old ... multiple desktop OSes running concurrently on Proxmox, etc. The "1 liter" class of PCs is really quite capable these days!
Thin clients off eBay. I picked up a Dell Wyse with 8gb memory, 4 cores, 16g emmc, and a 256G M.2 SSD for about $40. Includes the case, power supply, power button, etc. Still uses very little power. Install the x86_64 version of dietPi on that and it's been Rock solid running my docker projects.
Also picked up and HP T620 with similar specs. Haven't started using it yet but I expect similar results.
Much better deal than RPi and for most use cases equal or better able to do the job.
I picked up a Dell Wyse with 8gb memory, 4 cores, 16g emmc, and a 256G M.2 SSD for about $40
Wow, that was a very good deal! I've just had a look and for those specs 100€ are not enough here in Europe. For that price I've bought some Fujitsu Futro that are not even near those specs (2/4GB RAM, 8GB SSD).
A used NUC blows a raspi out of the water performance-wise, and they use surprisingly little power when not under load. I run proxmox with a NAS, pihole and homeassistant on a NUC from 2015, and it draws around 9W.
If you want embedded boards Rockchip and Sunxi/AllWinner are pretty well supported by the Linux kernel. Go have a look at boards with full Armbian support, that's usually a good shortcut to finding one.
My preference runs to the Nanopi boards, they're better built than Orange Pi hardware. You're going to see a lot of Orange Pi recommendations based on cost but be aware that they're not all that well made and occasionally have reliability problems. I was pretty chuffed for my $20 Orange Pi zero until I realized that the WiFi basically had zero chance of working reliably. Pick models carefully after reading about people's experiences with them on the Armbian forums so you can avoid duds.
If you don't need embedded arm check out the thin client selection on eBay. You can buy a J5005 Dell/Wyse thin client for like $100, some models even have a low profile pcie slot (these cost a bit more because they're desirable as pf/OPNsense platforms.) These make pretty solid Proxmox or container host platforms, or you can use them for their intended purpose and jam in a low profile graphics card.
My personal "I don't feel like spending $150 on a 4gb pi" favorite is the HP T630 thin client. On a good day you'll find an 8gb RAM model with the power brick for <$60 shipped. Do the eBay thing with any of these and try to best offer the price down a bit if it's an option.
If you want to step up a notch check out the HP T730, this one comes with a pcie slot and makes a fairly decent Proxmox virtualized router host. They're usually available for <$130/shipped or less. The HP T740 is the same thing with a Zen1 embedded SoC, those run ~$220 or so and support NVMe. The Wyse 5070 offers Celeron or Pentium options and is a <10W machine, the J5005 version actually works pretty well as a hardware transcoding PLEX host (provided you're not transcoding 4k.)
The T730 and T630 use SATA m.2 storage, the 5070 and T640 support NVMe. All of these have an m.2 A+E key slot for WiFi or an extra 2230 NIC.
I'd recommend an x86 board because as great as the RPI and similar can be, ARM just doesn't have the same support for a lot of things you might want to self host. I personally like to spring for a used thinclient PC off of eBay, because they have about the same resources as a Raspberry Pi but on an x86 platform. With my thin clients I typically install Alpine but a really light Debian install could work as well, and then from there you can go about installing Docker etc for a little homelab. Even better, if you get lucky and get a couple of them you could mess around with clustering them and some light Kubernetes at home. I've got mine running PiHole and Unbound on Alpine to serve my whole house with DNS and it works great. I don't think I've had hardly any downtime issues or anything of that sort.
TL;DR: try a couple cheap thin clients from eBay and you can run some light stuff on them for cheap.
ARM just doesn't have the same support for a lot of things you might want to self host
Like what? Person explicitly mentioned opensource software.
used thinclient PC
Usualy thay are cheap used, so it might work too
ARM software support is just generally rough, yeah it's good on RPi (and Mac) but on other boards it typically sucks, namely the cheaper boards OP would be buying. Here's a couple software examples though, I'm a big docker user and just the other day I was trying to run I believe Mastodon and Lemmy on an ARM device but there was just no image for it. I'm sure I could build an image myself but for someone just getting into Homelabbing (like OP), x86 is the platform to use.
I'm seconding this. The Pi-supply-dry is getting better, but for similar money to a Pi4 you can get an ex-corporate 1L mini PC (I like the HP G1 800's in a nice case, with engineered cooling, real storage, and easy memory upgrades.
I'm a big fan of dell wyse machines. Loads on ebay, ex business machines. X86 so decent support, decent dell power supply, on / off button / in cases and low power.
I have wyse 3040 for pihole cost 39.99
I have wyse 5070 with windows 10 for plex and running a Ubuntu 22 server in virtual box, cost 59.99
Pine64 single board computers. Rock64, Rockpro64, Quartz64.
Cheap chinese SBCs/TV boxes on Allwinner.
I really Dont know I am Ok with running chinese boards and also https://pine64.com/product-category/rockpro64/?v=0446c16e2e66
the boards you are showing me are 80-90$ which to me is maybe a lot since raspberry pi prices have started to slow down as well
Plus some dockers may not work and jellyfin is saying its not recommended to run it on rasp pi so i dont know actually
I migrated on to a NUC. They seem to have the right mix of performance and power efficiency, for me. The i3 processor also means you're not dealing with the extra complexity of Arm64.
I got a mini pc (e.g. a NUC). I did this after the price for rasps went sky high. Check out used NUCs, you can get a lot of power for the price.
This is the way I went, I got the tiny form factor versions of a Lenovo and Dell business desktops for about 100 bucks each. If you get lucky you can find real good deals on these things most will take a 2.5" drive as well as a m.2 drive, and they'll fit upwards of 32 or 64gb of ram depending on the device.
I have a nuc from 2015-2018 and its very bad at heat management. Like during summertime if the AC is not on its going to reboot itself after a while when using it (it can reach 35C° where it is stored) I now have a optiplex micro which is much better but I still want to use the NUC for something else
I use Hardkernel products for my kid's PCs, as pihole, etc. Their products are sold under the Odroid brand. I have the Odroid C1 and C4 line of SBCs and they work as expected. The C1 used to be my mediaplayer, now it runs a game server and pihole. A little older, but it still has use.
I've been using an XU4 for a number of years. Not used it as a server but it works great as a client. I'm sure it would with excellent as a server. I've had Ubuntu, tried Android, and currently running Batocera for gaming.
I like that it has an SD slot like a Pi but also a storage module which plugs onto the board which is much faster. I can boot from one or the other by flicking a switch on the board.
Only draw back is that it doesn't have onboard WiFi or Bluetooth and limited USB ports. I had to use a powered USB hub then find a PSU with a step down inverter to power it all, making it bigger than a small board. I'd still highly recommend it though.
Thin clients! $30, sometimes $15, for just as much CPU power as the Pi. More power usage, though. And ensure you buy the cables and SSD, check carefully what the seller is including or excluding from the shipment.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NAT | Network Address Translation |
| NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
| NVMe | Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage |
| PCIe | Peripheral Component Interconnect Express |
| PSU | Power Supply Unit |
| PiHole | Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) |
| RPi | Raspberry Pi brand of SBC |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SBC | Single-Board Computer |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
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What you are after is basically a server. Your next logical step if Pi is not enough - Intel NUC.
I've recently been looking into ESP32 programming - they're microcontrollers with onboard Bluetooth and WiFi, that are smaller yet more powerful than Arduinos. Randomnerdtutorials gets recommended a lot elsewhere; I believe I saw one tutorial for running a web server on an ESP32.
If you need a full OS and/or more resources, I'm not sure raspberry pi can be beaten (at least, that's how the market was years ago when I was looking)
You alluded to this already but ESP32 et al is really awesome but they (and arduino) are microcontrollers, not mini pcs like a raspi which have very different purposes.
You CAN run a webserver on a microcontroller but you’re essentially writing a program to do so. On a raspi you’re installing a full OS and then installing apps (nginx, Apache, jellyfin etc).
Conversely raspi has GPIO which can be used to easily interface with electronics just like the ESP32 but now you’re stuck maintaining a whole os to make your LED blink.
Jellyfin recommends not using SBCs. I was in the same boat as you a month ago. Started on an RPi. Works fine for raw (no transcoding). Poor performance if you do any scrubbing or try to watch something while new content is processing. Got a mini PC. It was better but its basically a laptop chipset, so still not the best experience. Had other things I wanted to do on my self-hosted setup so decided to just bite the bullet and make a proper build: 12th gen i5, Intel Arc GPU, 4+8 SATA ports with PCI card, 3xNVME, 10xHDD/SSD case. Can't speak to the performance yet. Learning Ansible to automate managing it including installing the OS.
I would stay away from NAS systems like QNAP or Synology. They tend to not be much better than a SBC.
For the budget constraints I would just echo getting the cheapest desktop-class PC you can get your hands on in a suitable form factor.
While hardware acceleration is supported on Raspberry Pi hardware, it is recommended that Jellyfin NOT be hosted on Raspberry Pis or other SBCs. Many hardware acceleration features are not supported and will fallback to software. In addition, they are generally too slow to provide a good experience when transcoding is needed. Please consider getting a more powerful system to host Jellyfin.
I would stay away from NAS systems like QNAP or Synology. They tend to not be much better than a SBC.
Some NAS systems have regular Intel x86 CPUs, and some have Ryzen CPUs with built in graphics. You need to check the specs carefully though.
I like fanless PCs. Some have gpio headers for home automation purposes.
For just self-hosting, I'd probably like using refurbished laptops. Seems nuts, but low power, included input and screen, built in UPS, and sometimes you can get them for like 100 bucks. You can just use a USB or wifi device for home automation purposes if need be.
Used an rpi4 for a year as a media server and was quite happy but wanted to run a few more things so I switched to an i3 NUC11 and I really like it. Running an arr stack + plex + jellyfin + nextcloud and its using 7w 'idle' (mentioned services running) with a headless debian 12. Fit a 5TB HDD in it and a 1TB nvme. 16GB or ram. It definitely runs faster and jellyfin is actually usable. Still though, rpi4 can handle the load (sans jellyfin). The rpi5 will also fit into this market very well.
Second hand thin clients (like the dell wyse already mentioned) are often cheap and easy to use https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/
I'm current using a refurbished business Lenovo mini PC. I've seen a similar model with i7 and 16GB of RAM for about $170 on Amazon. There are also mini PC's using NXXX model Intel CPU's with a TDP of 10w, but I don't think you can upgrade parts on those.
The RK3566 and RK3588 alternatives are pretty good, and there are a bunch of them from different companies.
I have a 3566 myself as a compatible alternative to a CM4, and it does its job just fine.
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