this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
40 points (91.7% liked)

Selfhosted

40347 readers
328 users here now

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.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

My current setup consists of a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4gb RAM and a 1tb external SSD. I'm thinking of getting a used mini PC for around 100€ to replace that tho because it would give me a lot more power and especially RAM (I currently need to use an 8gb swap file). My plan so far is to get a used mini PC that's quiet, has a built-in SSD and at least 8gb of RAM (16 would be better). Because of the built-in SSD, I could also sell the external SSD and buy an 8-12tb HDD instead.

Does anyone have recommendations for what mini PC to get or things that I should look out for?

Edit: Thanks for all the help! I decided on the Firebat T8 Pro Plus with 16gb RAM and 512gb internal storage because that really seems to be perfect for my use case.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Fisch@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

Just looked around and there are mini PCs for around 130€ with Intel N100 CPUs, which have a 6W TDP, AV1 decoding and they beat an i5 6500T (that one's in a 130€ Dell Optiplex I found on ebay) in single core and gets close enough in multicore. Is there some kind of catch I'm not seeing with that CPU? Because it looks perfect for my use case.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The N100 has a reputation for decent performance and good power efficiency at a cheap price. It's a basic quad core CPU with only efficiency cores (no performance cores) and no hyperthreading, but it comes with modern codec capabilities. It will certainly give you more power than a Raspberry Pi for everyday tasks, but don't expect to do anything too demanding with it. If your needs are basic an N100 mini PC seems like a good option.

[–] PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I can't comment on the performance but yeah.. 6500t is what, 8 years old at this point? N100 is a year old. Tech can improve a lot in that time.

[–] somenonewho@feddit.de 3 points 9 months ago

Can't quite speak for the n100 but I got a n305 one of these "China PCs" it's passively cooled (which was important since it's running in my bedroom) and seems to have amazing performance for what I need (I put jellyfin on there). I'm quite happy after futzing around with ARM SBCs and external drives this just works so well.

[–] ByteWizard@lemm.ee 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

One catch is that you have to assume it's gonna be sending data to China or at least have a hidden backdoor, possibly both. That may not matter depending on what they are doing.

[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Another catch is that the hardware design is bad. They usually cheap out and those machines have close to no ESD protection on all I/O ports. A simple short in a USB device will most likely kill the motherboard and/or CPU.