I’ve been running a Plex server for music off my gaming laptop for a few months and (I think) I’m ready to take it further - that is, I’d like to have the server running on its own hardware.
At this point, I’d just be running a music server, but I know I’ll want to add more services.
The first would be something like Google Drive - I’m working with a couple of other people on business plans and I’d love to self-host our files and the software (like LibreOffice) to edit them.
I’m comfortable with the software side and I’m finding lots of options, especially in this community.
The hardware side… I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by all the options and I don’t know enough to judge the search results.
Any recommendations for hardware or links to guides would be appreciated.
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A simple way to ensure your selfhosting is easy to manage is to get a NAS for storage and then other device(s) for compute. For your current plans I think you’d get far with a Synology DS224+ (or DS423+ if you want more disk slots).
Then when the NAS starts to be not enough you can add an extra device for compute (a mini pc or whatever you want) and let that device use the NAS as a storage.
Oh and budget to buy at least one large USB Drive to use as a backup, even if your NAS runs a redundant RAID.If you have a spare laptop/phone, I’d find a good tutorial and start there and then venture towards new hardware as your needs require it. Personally, I bought a (used) laptop when my main laptop wouldn’t boot, but then I wiped my malfunctioning laptop and it started working again. I’ve been using the used laptop as a server ever since.
Personally, I have yet to find something that I couldn’t self-host on the laptop and still don’t quite grasp why I’d need a heavier-powered device.
I’d get any optiplex, the newer the better.
I will just get an AMD (7745HX?) mini PC with adequate RAM and call it a day. It should run almost anything that you throw in a light setup with minimal power usage.
I would suggest an Intel N100 mini PC if you are planning to transcode video files with Plex. Intel Quick Sync performs better than AMD for media transcoding.
+1 on lower tier Intel CPU mini PC. I have a slew of different boxes by Beelink, Intel, and Asus. The N95 box I bought from Beelink (basically an N100) has been one of the most impressive for being so low power, and yet handling the wealth of services I’ve been running on it (with a lot of overhead yet).
What you gain in quicksync you lose in raw CPU power for other tasks. If you don’t need to transcode your video, or you pre transcode what needs transcoding at night when you’re not doing anything then you can bog the CPU down then, while still having TONS more power available during the day.
According to geekbench the 7745HX is 2.5x the single core performance, and almost 6x the multi core performance. Under load power consumption will be a lot higher, but idle should be low enough to not really make a difference.
The two are not even remotely in the same category of CPU. This is a comparison of apples to orchards.
Downside to mini PC is very limited storage room in mini PCs for local Plex content. They typically have 1-2 Nvme slots. You can get a 12TB 3.5" for the price of one 4tb.
100%.
I know this is a thread for someone new, but perhaps as a future fix: I grabbed a mini PC to do plex transcoding and all of Plex’s content is on a separate NAS with a 14TB RAID. I think the mini PC has 500GB by default
I’ll look into this. This is kinda my holiday gift to myself.
Any good sites to buy? I’m trying to avoid Walmart and Amazon.
Minisforum
I bought this one and it’s been wonderful to run +20 services. A few of those are Forgejo (github replacement), Jellyfin (Plex but actually self-hosted), immich (Google Photos replacement), frigate (to process one security camera).
(Only Immich does transcoding, jellyfin already has all my media preprocessed from the GPU of my laptop)I bought it bare-bone since I already had the RAM and an SSD, plus I wasn’t to use windows. During this year I’ve bought another SSD and a HDD.
I bought it on amazon, but you could buy it from the seller, although I’d recommend amazon to not deal with the import and have an easy return policy.
Check eBay for used business micro/mini/tiny PCs. They’re pretty cheap, and low power consumption. They’re mostly Intel processors, so that’s what you make of it. If I were you I’d look for i3 processors 9th gen and up, i5 and i7 8th Gen and up for transcoding. They can hardware transcode pretty much anything but AV1, vp9, and hevc 12bit but the processors are powerful enough that they can transcode those to x265/264 to a device or two using the CPU without issues.
If you don’t plan on transcoding, I’ve had no issues with a 5th Gen i5 NUC doing server things, but I do offload any processor heavy things to my 7060 micro (8th Gen i7) machine if I want it done quickly.