I dusted off my RPI4 and started tinkering with self-hosting things and it’s sparked a fire. Suddenly I have 7 docker containers running and I need more RAM, more space and I want something reliable with room to grow. I like small form factors but it doesn’t need to be RPI small. Any recs for your favorite hardware under $500?

  • Unaware7013
    1•2 years ago

    I totally get moving away from the dell. I’ve got one sitting in my rack now, and I’ve been thinking about getting a nuc or two as replacement to see if I can drop my power bill.

    How much of a difference did you notice in your bill when downsizing?

    • @blackstratA
      2•2 years ago

      It’s running at roughly half the power of the dell, which was at 220W idle. A lot of that will be the spinning disks, HBA card and 4 port intel NIC. A barebones system with just one ssd would be about 30W idle.

      The NUCs are great but storage and networking are limited. I use Opnsense in a VM as my router so needed a few more ports. And the storage options on a NUC seem very limiting. Perfect for application servers, just not storage servers.

      • Unaware7013
        2•2 years ago

        That’s about what I was expecting. Yours is running about 30W higher than mine, but that’s still a hell of a delta.

        Thanks for the other points as well! NIC quantity will be an issue since I will be moving my esx over, but hopefully I can limp by on a single line and let VLAN tagging handle most of my mess. I’ve been running some of my VMs via iscsi storage, and it performs well enough for my uses at home.