Hi everyone, Last month I finally managed to build my first SFF PC (Ryzen 7600 + AMD 6800). I’m also starting to learn about self-hosting and tinkering with it (the usual stuff: Jellyfin, pi-hole, nextcloud, VPN, torrenting etc.)

Thing is, of course, a server has to be always on, and I’m having trouble understanding if it can be reasonable to keep it always on or if it’s too pricey and I should invest in a dedicated hardware.

My consideration: a Raspberry Pi seems like it’s not enough powerfull after all. I’ve seen you can come up with an old i5 (4th to 6th gen) minipc with like 100/150 euros, but in not really sure it’s gonna consume much less than my system. What do you suggest? What am I missing?

Thank you :)

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I started with a Pi 4 8GB. It was not able to keep my RAID 1 (constantly loosing one of the two drives, degraded when added back). Transcoding of movies, also Jellyfin, just not possible. So I bit the bullet and took some old hardware (i7-4790K, 1070, 16GB RAM, PSU, CPU-Cooler) and bought some more used (SFF case, mini-itx board, Bluray-Drive). The case wasn’t the cheapest (56€), because I wanted one with enough room for 5.25" drive and 4 3.5" HDDs. Finding a mini itx board for such an old platform was hard and cost 120€ (I didn’t sell the ATX board I originally used with the CPU, yet). But now it’s a great system, running 19 containers atm In other words, don’t underestimate the cost of old hardware. You may find a cheaper, used prebuilt somewhere

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