this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Are NUC hardware good for self hosting? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
47 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Pretty much what the title says, I was wondering, since I want to invest on self hosting applications and my raspberry pi 3 b+ can barely function. I don't have enormous expectations, just docker containers, nextcloud, pihosted, jellyfin... Any further suggestions (regarding the hardware) will be much appreciated.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
NAS Network-Attached Storage
NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
Plex Brand of media server package
SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
nginx Popular HTTP server

6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.

[Thread #7 for this sub, first seen 19th Jul 2023, 12:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Good bot

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Intel NUCs are known for that purpose, a lot of plex builds are based on the iGPU

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

+1 to this

Some models also have programmable LEDs in the front that you can use to display the status of the system or app/service

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I hit the limit of my Raspberry Pi 4. It would periodically crash itself by overheating (Heatsink was hot to the touch) I now use a NUC. It runs excellently, and handles my home automation setup fine. Unless I start doing something extreme, I can see myself overloading it.

One of the less mentioned things with self hosting is running costs. A Pi is extremely cheap to run. A NUC is a bit more, but still well below a full blown PC. Servers can actually pull a significant load, even when idle.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thanks for mentioning running costs, I was curious about that. How much more do you think the NUC is costing you compared to a Pi?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Not op, but a nuc idles around 5 watts, and at load can use up to 100 watts depending on specs. A raspberry pi4 idles somewhere around 3.5 watts and at load is still under 10 watts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

From memory, I think it worked out 50-80% more power draw, on average. I might be wrong on that however, I've yet to do a will watt measurement with like for like loads. My testing was closer to both idling.

The NUC can draw more power, but has far more advanced power saving features too. I ended up budgeting using 20W.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You may get more bang for your buck by getting a comparable mini PC rather than a NUC. Some ThinkCentre Tiny machines are listed on eBay for less than $100 USD. HP and other manufacturers sell their own versions as well.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

ThinkCentre Tiny machine

Or dell optiplex for a bargain.

Got myself a Dell 8gen 8GB 256GB SSD for 40€... Got a 6 core (8500?, It came with a "Pentium Gold" bi core) for 60€ and a 4TB HD for 70€... For example. I think it will handle a lot before needing an upgrade. It's a smallish tower though, but sff versions exist too.

It's as crazy how cheap those PCs are and how expensive Raspberries has become :-/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It’s as crazy how cheap those PCs are and how expensive Raspberries has become :-/

On the former, it's because these are mostly models sold en masse after company upgrades. Often marked as "refurbished" although I suspect it's just basic checks. Regarding the Pi, seems to be supply issues; they should at least start being sold at retail price again this year from what I hear, not that it's necessarily worth it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree, but what about power usage?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah sure, it's not the same.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I am running almost everything in my home on a NUC (Celeron J3455 1.5GHz with 8GB RAM) and it doesn't break a sweat.

Running invidious, nextcloud, kavita, airsonic, n8n, audiobookshelf, freshrss, calibre-web, vaultwarden, nginx proxy manager

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes, the only thing being that most NUCs can only have one drive (or one m.2 and one 2.5" sata drive) so you can't do anything like drive mirroring so if you lose a drive you're in trouble.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Ideally youwould be storing those files on a NAS anyways.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've had the drive on my kodi box fail a couple of times now, it's annoying. Torrenting probably puts a lot of wear on the drive though so it's to be expected.

I have two old NUCs, one DN2820FYK with an Intel Celeron N2830, and another D54250WYKH with an Intel Haswell i5-4250U. The former can only take one drive but the latter can have an mSATA as well as a 2.5" SATA. I'd like to use the latter with root on the mSATA SSD and a 2TB HDD for media in the 2.5" SATA, but for some reason I get better video playback on the Celeron than the Haswell. Both are supposed to have hardware acceleration for h264 and the Haswell is a more powerful processor so I don't understand it!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One thing that could help a lot would be have a third drive off one of the USB ports, a cheap large spinning drive, and have a cronjob to routinely copy the contents of your drive to the cheap spinning drive to the backup drive. That way even if you lose your SSD or your SATA drive, you still have a somewhat recent version of all your files elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Not a bad idea, however I've had problems with some of the firmware (I think, maybe it's the kernel) on external HDDs causing them to power off when not in use for long periods of time. For some reason it doesn't happen with internal drives so it must be the enclosure or the way the system deals with the drive.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

They provide the best balance for efficiency. Not too powerful enough to be a workhorse and not to weak to run multiple simple applications/services. NUCs are great in that they come with hardware video acceleration tech that's highly optimized for media transcoding.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

A nuc is far more better than a Raspberry Pi. A Pi sure can do some things, but once you start, you will want more 🌞

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Very similar, but usually dramatically cheaper... Look into the Lenovo Tiny line of PCs, you can get a used model with a surprising amount of power for a lot less than you'd see in a comparable NUC and in my experience, they're usually hardier machines.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If you're buying and want it cheap this is 100% the way to go. I got an M900 to go with my NUC and it only cost $60 for one with an i7 vs $200 for a similar NUC

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@[email protected] In general I think old, small computer laptops are going to be a better long-term solution for self-hosting than a raspberry pi.

Sure, it is hard to compete in terms of size, but you will soon find yourself looking for bigger specs anyways

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I think you may have responded to the wrong person.

The Lenovo tiny line isn't related to Raspberry Pi/etc and I didn't mention a Raspberry Pi. I have a server running on an M900 tiny with an i7-6700 in it and 32gb of RAM. That is the high spec config from Lenovo, but there are room for upgrades if you were willing to buy parts separately, however the value proposition starts to fall apart rapidly when buying non-standard parts and compatibility is kind of a coin flip. Even the lowest spec ones should almost always outpace a Pi though (usually by a healthy amount) while still being very small compared to a typical computer. Solid chance the tiny will also be cheaper than a Pi. Compared to laptops, they'll usually also easily outpace those too in terms of performance in terms of money spent, but that's obviously a lot more variable.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Totally. My setup is on a NUC8i5BEH.

Handles 4K Plex like a dream, all the *arrs, multiple website services. I have about 50 or so containers and it doesn't get close to full CPU usage.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

i3 are good enough for the things I wrote or should I got for i5/i7?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

depends on how many services you plan on running, i think the i3 would be sufficient for what you listed, the i5 would give you room to grow.

the i7’s usually aren’t worth it for servers since they are just a clock speed increase.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Celeron would handle that (see my other reply)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

In general, I'd say it's good enough. i5 might have more cores if you need them, but then i7 only gets you slightly higher frequency, which may not be worth the price.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Check for the exact core configuration and cache size via Intel Ark first. More often than not i5 and i7 can have the same core configuration and cache size but difference base and boost frequencies.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

If you need something that packs more power than a Pi while still being somewhat energy efficient and small form factor then yes, the NUCs are generally pretty good.

Personally I'm running a NUC from 2018 with a 8th gen i3 that's pulling double duty as both a server running about ~10 docker containers, and as a media center.

The server part still runs flawlessly, though the media center part is getting a bit slow when opening websites on it.

As others have already said, one drawback is that there's only space for one drive, so at least a NAS or external USB storage is recommended for backups.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Definitely! I’ve used them for years and they are super convenient. Especially in small space living. I have a small server setup in a closet that is a direct attached raid array with an m1 Mac and an Intel nuc on top.

In general I prefer the max because it can do a lot with very minimal heat generation but using a Mac mini as a server has a few downsides that you won’t run into with a nuc. Things like arm vs x86, no way to run the OS headless, cost, etc…

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm running all my microservices on a couple of repurposed NUC5i5RYKs, running Ubuntu Server 22.04 (I know I know) and Docker. They've been absolutely rock steady thus far, though not quite as overkill as I like all my computers to be. But I got them in 2015 and they've held up more than admirably.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I have a 2015 NUC I use as my server with next cloud, immich, jellyfin, gitlab and more. Mostly, I wish I put more ram in and could have two internal drives, but otherwise I love the form factor.

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