Selfhosted

Check out Serve the home's TinyMiniMicro project: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC53fzn9608B-MT5KvuuHct5MiUDO8IF4&si=1Yx9e7TqLSUlYF3g

This is the route I went. SFF PC with I5 3rd gen, 8GB RAM and about 20 docker Containers running at the moment @ 10% - 15% CPU usage and 3GB memory.

Power consumption is around 15W. A bit more than a Raspi but much more potent and with a easy upgrade path.

So far I have absolutely no rerets. For most things self hosted the cpu is not that important. Even transcoding is no problem with the integrated iGPU.

If you have further questions I am happy to help.

A used Thinkcenter Tiny off eBay is cheaper than a NUC and has better performance than a Pi. HP and Dell have similar tiny PCs that are inexpensive used. A separate NAS would probably be best, but you could start with a USB 3 external drive and shuck it later.

I used two pies. Rpi3 for home assistant, pihole and zigbee+mqtt. rpi4 for arr stack and nextcloud with a 5TB disk on it. Swiched to everything in a i3 NUC 11 i got for 200eur. Works better, uses less power if you can believe it.

A note about transcoding: I dont know your setup but I never needed it. All video I have is encoded in h264 or HEVC and all my video player devices support these codecs natively. The last time I needed to transcode was 10 years ago when all I had for a media player was a Wii and a movie in HEVC.

If you can find a second hand PC with a Celeron, they're pretty low draw, and it will mean you can open it up and add as many drives as it has SATA ports. We did the same, got an old PC for £30 and added drives and more RAM.

My solution for a power efficient setup was to split it up: all the services I use but don't need all the time, like jellyfin for example, I host on my nas. I only turn that on when I need it.

The stuff that's running all the time, like home assistant, addblocker, etc, I run on a raspberry pi.

Might not work for everyone, but I'm happy with it.

Get a power measuring device if you don’t have one and consider the real cost of buying something new if you already have something. For instance, I have an older gaming laptop I am considering repurposing for my home automation stuff. While idling it draws about 10w which is amazing to me and a number I never would have guessed. For me that works out to (24 hours * 10w * 365 days* 1000w/Kw ) 87kwh per year. I pay about 10 cents per kwh so say $10 a year. Buying something to save a little power will never work out.

My current home server is an intel NUC from 2013! It can’t do some of the things I would like to add on, but it is a great media server and downloader. Powerful hardware isn’t really a necessity.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #194 for this sub, first seen 6th Oct 2023, 10:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Out of the options you listed, I'd go with the NUC for performance and transcoding.

I’m a big raspi fan but I think the Pi 4 will be overpowered for your needs.

Honestly servers don't need to be speced out of oblivion. I use a 10 year old desktop and added a 1TB ssd and it does 99% of what I want it too.

Most important thing for a server is probably the CPU and making sure it has as many cores as possible and maybe hyper threading because you'll be running a lot if simultaneous services and users.

I went the mini-computer route, like a NUC, and used an external HDD. I regret not having HDD bays for internal storage needs. I've been looking at used desktops (Optiplex for example) that would allow me to use internal HDDs easily.

I have a 4 bay Synology and an HP G2 800 i7-6700, plus a POE switch, couple of cameras, omada WAP. The software load is mostly Jellyfin and Syncthing plus a BOINC LXC that pegs one core. Power consumption generally sits at around 55-65W (my APC UPS has a power readout) from memory the idle was pretty low - I think 24W although that might have been the previous 2 bay NAS.

I think your plan of a NUC and a NAS (I'd stick to 2 bay) is a good compromise for low power and easy of setup/management. I have my NAS configured to keep the rust spinning - I'm sure I'd save a bit of power by letting it spin down, but the delay when I starting some media in Jellyfin was annoying, and I suspect the disks will live longer moving anyway.