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.
Bonus: there is a literally endless supply of used x86 SFF hardware from large institutions, so unlike SBC’s, there’s no special, weird supply chain managed by an English educational nonprofit that could just suddenly decide to not sell to the public for years at a time.
Good point.
The Pi Zero is 2w max… It’s downside is it draws 2w MAX. Power is power, only so much you can do in 2w. As you pointed out, the 4 and 5 can do more, because they can draw more, (or they draw more so can do more, it’s all related).
The key seems to be ability to minimize the idle power while still capable of ramping up to something useful when you need it - like the micros you’ve listed.
Try a used laptop. Cheap, power efficient, built in UPS, small. Can be quite powerful and some are even upgradable
Dammit, I have a few of those, you’re killing my excuse to buy a new toy!
Let me help you with that: what if you need more power? or what if you need something smaller due to size constraints or maybe what if the old battery can’t handle 24/7?. Pick one!
absolutely this.
As a point of reference regarding power consumption:
I’ve been running a desktop non-stop for the last ten years (built as a gaming rig) as a file/media server, so it’s probably the worst thing you can run this way, power-wise. Has an 800 watt power supply, running windows.
I’ve done the math many times, costs me about $1/day in power at mostly idle.
Just presenting a worst-case example as a guideline.
I’ve recently spun up a Raspberry Pi Zero W for PiHole, DHCP, DNS, Tailscale, Joplin and Bitwarden. It’s maximum power draw is TWO WATTS. Haha
Currently running a watt meter on the desktop, should have some decent actual numbers from it soon, but can’t imagine idle is any less than 50 watts.
So there’s two extremes. Don’t be me (looks like you aren’t!)
Edit: I wouldn’t recommend the Zero W for this, it’s underpowered. I’m already overloading it with just PiHole and Tailscale, honestly.
Throwing in my own data, I have a small server rack at home that runs a brocade icx4630 switch and dell r720, idles around 250w. My desktop setup, monitors, amp, computer itself etc idles around 200w.
Oof. Maybe my power is worse than I thought!
Adding my data as well:
My server is diy desktop pc - mbo MSI Z270-A PRO with celeron G3930 and 16GB RAM, 3x SSD on 550W PSU, idles at 23W. After adding another 3.5" HDD consuption went up to 34W. 34W in Ctoatia is around 34€ a year.
Some SFF PCs are at 10-15W. SBCs like rpi should be below 10 W, but dont think you can get anything new for 80€
Yeah same. I have several machines that whirrr all the time. The power cost and usage is fairly negligible. The real costs in the house are appliances. OP will save more energy by getting a more power efficient fridge or dishwasher than worry about a computer being on in the closet
A raspberry pi or orange pi could definitely run all of those things at very low power consumption.
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.
Raspberry Pi was my first choice, but apparently I can’t even back order it :/
Alternatively, there are also some options from pine64.com, maybe scroll through there! Same for odroid.nl
That reminds me, I do own a pine64 device! It was the first thing I got on Kickstarter.
It’s a Pine A64, with 2gb RAM. I wonder if it has enough power to run all those things. It’s a budget device from 8 years ago, probably gonna have a hard time but I’ll give it a try if I manage to find it!
Very nice! I am running an HC4 (I think; the toaster) now since last month and so far, it’s running much better than I thought! So yes, check that one first, then see if you have to upgrade and if you do, go for aarch64 or traditional x64 but not 32 bit arm
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Shout out for ODROID, their product revision cycles take too long (lmao why are they still selling a 32-bit chip that was an iffy investment back in 2013), but when they drop new stuff, it tends to be great.
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
In my country pi4 8GB ram with PSU 130€ and then you need SD card and/or SSD
A cheap android box + armbianOs is also an option if you’re looking for low power. I have a 7watt one that’s running 24/7 for the last few years.
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.
Wow, 7w. And has real horsepower unlike RPi.
Im really impressed with the thing. Cpu idles at 30C as well. Very similar to rpi4 with 5 times the performance.
Lenovo m900 tiny. Low cost and power.
At around 80 euros then for lowest power you should go Raspberry Pi, for most performance while still being low power an old business laptop is fine, and since you don’t need the screen you can buy one with a broken screen.
HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini (or equivalent)? You can get them for pretty cheap on eBay.
Hey fellow european!
Tinytronics.nl -> Pi4 model B 8GB: 87€ and in stock. The 4GB model is 68€. They also have orange Pi for a higher budget.
Kiwi-electronics.com -> Pi 4 model B, 4GB? 63€. They also have all the pi accessories you could want.
If you are going to use paperless for important documents, and if you want to not lose data for sure, get a 1TB cheap HDD or something and a USB3.0 adapter. SD cards will eventually fail.
Otherwise, get an old used laptop 2nd hand. I used an old HP probook G1 laptop for about a year for my server. It didn’t use much power at all.
A used Android pixel phone. You can root it and install Pideploy and run PiHole through it.
I have an old Pixel 3a doing exactly this. The other services I don’t quite know if they have an Android implementation.
Doesn’t suit your every use case, but I figured I’d share.
termux-root has a docker package. That still doesn’t cover everything but a lot of popular services have docker images
Ooo learn something new every day. I’m going to have to try this out later. Thanks!
Any Intel NUC(the small 4x4 ones) 8th gen or forward will fit the bill.
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.Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PSU Power Supply Unit PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
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