Hello, I’m quite new to the self-hosted experience, and so far I’ve been running my services from a RPi3b, and I’m looking to upgrade.
One of requirements is that the system is silent and cheap to run. Also, it should be mostly self contained. My Pi is in a passive cooled aluminum case.
So I’ve been looking at options and stumble upon the Bmax N1 plus, it’s a cheap, passive cooled, low power Celeron machine with a bunch of internal storage options. I’ve seen a couple of critics in yt saying that is too slow for console emulation, but how about running services?
Other option I’ve checked out was the Zima board, but the whole naked computer aspect is not particularly to my liking and I don’t have the tools to build a nice case for it.
I’m mostly interested in running home assistant and jellyfin.
I got a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Tiny Intel i7-7700T on eBay for just under $200 USD. Though you can find slightly older less powerful ones for a bit cheaper. It does have a fan, but stays generally pretty quiet unless it’s under a super load. It’s easy enough to add an M.2 drive and get an 2.5" drive enclosure (I got on amazon).
I agree that x86_64 architecture is much more versatile than arm.
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Thanks! now I’m looking at fanless N100 and N200 options from AliExpress. I really can’t handle fan noise…
These seem to be intended for pfsense and routers, any experience running HA on them?
Those mini PCs are actually have extremely quiet fans at idle and you generally won’t notice the noise. The good part about an actively cooled system is that you have the ability to load up the machine without throttling in case there’s a sudden activity spike.
I haven’t run HA bare-metal but I have run HA on Proxmox and I’ve run Proxmox on these mini PCs. In my use case they supplement the main rack server in my cluster.
I ran on a Celeron J1900 for a while and for basic home services it was great.
I didn’t do any emulation or media transcoding so I can’t comment there. But I did run vpn / nas / web host kinda stuff.
I do not know where are you from but in Poland Dell Wyse 5070 with J5005 is really cheap and popular for selfhosting. It is really powerful (for passively cooled device) and a couple of my friends are using it for selfhosting Home Assistant
thanks for the suggestion. I ended up buying a N5100, with a case that’s a large heat sink, so I hope for the best.
I moved my services a couple of months ago from a RPi3b to a second hand HP ProDesk 600 sff. You also have a Dell variant (Dell Optiplex SFF). These can be found for around €100/$100, don’t use to much electricity and are way more powerful than the RPi. Also, they use the x86-64 instruction set instead of arm which has better software availability. Let me know if you want to know the specific specs/version I have!
