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.
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.
Try a used laptop. Cheap, power efficient, built in UPS, small. Can be quite powerful and some are even upgradable
Even has a KVM for emergency access ;)
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.
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.
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.
In my country pi4 8GB ram with PSU 130€ and then you need SD card and/or SSD
Raspberry Pi was my first choice, but apparently I can’t even back order it :/
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
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I just bought a cheap Intel i3 10100T that have a TDP of 35W.
There is a bios option to reduce that to 25W.
Thoses are not sold to end users and must be purchased through craiglist or equivalent.TDP is not related to power consumption, it’s related to dissipation.
The thermal dissipation is directly linked to the amount of power consumed.
It’s not and it’s insane. TDP is a fucky “metric”.
A refurbished elite desk sff PC works great.
Just got one for $100 on r/hardwareswap (yes I still visit reddit, but I can’t give up hardwareswap) a couple weeks ago
You can get them on eBay and Amazon for that much.
