Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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SBC's like Raspberry Pi's are ok, but tend to suck for fileserving tasks like Jellyfin. Their CPU's are poor IPC and will choke on transcoding video, and they're pretty I/O limited too. They'll work but they're not scalable if you're expecting more than one or two users. And straight up forget using the onboard SD cards for storage, they're slow and will commit suicide as fast as you can replace them.
Some SBC's with better I/O and CPU's exist, such as the Orange Pi 5 I just bought which supports a NVME M.2 2242 drive and has a CPU roughly 4x the overall performance of a RPI. However, they're also not cheap- a decent specced OPI5 with 8gb of memory will still run you $100. And they require the addition of aftermarket cooling to not thermal throttle constantly, which will take some tinkering. Given how bloody cheap flash memory has gotten though- you can get lower end 1TB M.2 drives for like $60- they're a half decent option for a very power efficient and compact little set-and-forget self host board that can hold a respectable amount of media.
Next best thing would be to shop around Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist and find a SFF office PC like an Optiplex 9020. Try to get a i5 CPU for 4 cores, and a minimum of 4gb of RAM although 8 would be ideal. They're small enough, although they will use significantly more power than a SBC (typical low-load idle for my 9020 is around 30W from the wall- under load it's 110-120)
Laptops are more power efficient than SFF's but you have to be careful that they have removable batteries. Li-ion cells can and will start to puff up when run fully charged at high temperatures, such in a closed laptop doing server duty.
I didn't know SD cards would be so bad, I'll definitely get an external drive then.
The orange seems like a good option too, sure it's a bit pricier, but I could make it work if its worth it. And also, I'm not planning on having more than one concurrent user (just me on one device at a time) I don't need to scale it, so I guess I'll be fine with an orange or even a bit less?
Now that you mention it, I'd rather not start an impromptu BBQ so maybe laptops are not my first option, unless I can somehow limit the battery charge or completely bypass the battery. I'll do some more research on that. As far as electricity goes, its very cheap where I am so I don't think the less efficient mini PCs would hurt.
Thanks for the advice :)
yeah consumer SD cards cannot handle sustained writes like most OS'es generate. Even endurance cards can have issues past a few months in an always-on Pi depending on what it's hosting.
also worth nothing ARM support for many apps can be missing, which is another mark against SBC's. They have their place if you're willing to fuck with them though.
Laptops are OK if you can disable charging or ideally have a removable battery. However SFF office PC's are typically the cheapest to buy unless you find laptops with already dead batteries that nobody else wants. If power is not of a concern, the SFF pc is probably your best bet.