I’m moderately tech savvy, a little experience with most OS and comfortable with hardware. I’ve got some basic things working in Docker. I want to start self hosting my photo backup, Bitwarden, Jellyfish, Sonarr and Radarr, Pi hole, Home Assistant and replace Dropbox. But the more I dive into the hardware and setup the more muddled I’m finding myself.
I’m very concerned about power draw so the lower the consumption the better. I do want some parity, though I’m willing to I introduce that once it’s set up. I’m not particularly concerned with transcoding but I guess it’d be a nice bonus.
Is a QNAP alone valid? Or perhaps I’m better off with a Pi and my huge GDrive while I learn? Or a NUC with better transcoding capability? I want to access my data internally, stream content to a Chromecast with Google TV.
My instinct is both a NUC and a separate NAS but I’e love it if anyone has some insight.
Thanks!
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.
You can get the power consumption down to 5W by using the smaller versions. My HP prodesk g3 800 mini draws 5W and is perfectly capable of running docker, Jellyfin, etc.
And it was only 100€, which is pretty awesome.
