Looking to build/buy a headless Linux PC to #selfhost a few things including #pihole, #Nextcloud, media server, etc. Nothing that needs amazing compute power. Ideally small form factor like a NUC. This is replacing a Raspberry Pi 4 which I feel is underpowered and cumbersome with the 2.5" external drives separate or externally powered 3.5 inch drives. Ideally I’d be able to use the cheaper 3.5" drives on this setup without needing external power that requires.
I looked on local resale options and can’t seem to find anything available.
Thanks
I’ll be honest, with the prices of RAM and storage nowadays, it’s not an ideal moment to start self-hosting. Given that you already have 3.5’’ drives, I suggest going for a NAS form if you can afford it. Also, a multiple app server with Nextcloud won’t work well unless the system has 8 GB RAM at the minimum, preferably 16. Try getting a more modern processor, as those come with support to encode more recent video formats and you mentioned having a media server.
Even with the inflated prices, buying storage is much cheaper than renting it from cloud services.
The target lifetimes for a NAS hard drive is 5 years. A 16TB NAS drive will cost less over that 5 years than Apple’s 2TB cloud storage plan. And that’s assuming Apple won’t raise over those 5 years (they will).
For instance, a server will probably work just right with an Intel N150 processor - decent power, low consumption, and support to encode up to VP9/HEVC (no AV1 though)