Selfhosted

Raspberry Pi 5 exists?

Oh neat! https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/

A 35W i7-7700T mini PC from 2017 will absolutely spank a modern N150 in single and multi–threaded applications, and uses very little extra power to do so.

Mini PC is the way to go.

I would avoid a Raspi/ARM at all costs. But there is a third alternative: A x86 SBC like a Zima Board or blade might be exactly what you are looking for. Small, powerful enough and far easier than an ARM to maintain.

usually works well enough, but some aren't built great and can have stability issues. i usually have the thing running for a few months with light tasks to ensure it's stable before putting it into critical use.

external usb-sata enclosures cause a lot of issues, so i test those as well.

Mini PC

Overwhelming majority of my servers are tiny/mini/micros.

Raspberry pi: No. Or, at least, not without doing something to make sure you have a real storage backend and aren't just running it off an SD card. The wear on SD cards is exaggerated and largely minimized if you use an OS that is configured to be aware of it but you are also increasingly relying on a ticking time bomb.

Mini PC/NUC? I am a huge fan of these and think they are what most people actually need for stuff like home assistant, adguard, etc. Just understand you are going to be storage limited sooner than you expect and you can oversubscribe that CPU and memory a lot faster than you would expect.

My general suggestion? Install proxmox on the mini PC and deploy on top of that. If/when you decide you want something more, migration is usually pretty easy.

And if you just want a NAS? It is really hard to go wrong with a 4 bay NAS from one of the reputable vendors (which may just be ugreen at this point?) as those tend to still come out cheaper than building it yourself and 4 disks means you can either play with fire with RAID5 or not be stupid and do RAID1.

Whatever is cheapest. When youre first starting out basically any hardware will do, it just needs to boot Linux. As you progress and find more stuff to put on the servers, you'll discover what you're real hardware needs are.

When I first started, it was a hand me down single core AMD Sempron machine (socket 754!) that I later upgraded to an Athlon64 and 4gb of DDR. I managed to bodge that poor thing into running a Minecraft 1.5.2 server.

Personally I would stick with the i3 machine since I am assuming it's an office PC that can be had for cheaper than a Pi 5 (which is quite inflated in price IMO). x86 still retains better software support vs ARM and they are significantly easier to attach large cheap storage to via SATA. Power cost will be greater but I doubt an office i3 pulls more than 70w wall power at full load.

The Mini PC would be a lot easier. The RPi needs things to be built for ARM, and not everything is. The RPi is also slower and isn’t repairable.

RPis are great for many things, but generic home servers aren’t one of them, unless you really need clustering for some reason (like, a Ceph cluster).

I built a home server based on an Intel N100 motherboard a while ago. I've put proxmox on it and run my Home Assistant installation, Nextcloud, several other stuff and even my router as an OpenWRT VM!

I chose to go the N100 motherboard route mainly due to the flexibility it offers. But you can just buy a N100 based NUC and you get effectively the same performance and incredible low power consumption.

I would recommend against the Pi 5. It is way underpowered in my opinion. Plus with a x86 system you just have a lot more software compatibility.

I’ve have amazing luck with both Beelink and Minisforum computers. They’re relatively cheap and excellent quality.

I personally use the Beelink ME Mini and it’s been able to handle just fine about any server tasks I need it to, not to mention the wildly expandable storage.

I bought a generic N150 based minipc for a firewall & router (running OPNsense), and repurposed an old desktop PC as a server to host immich, paperless, nextcloud, etc.. I considered both RPi and mini pc for the server, but I needed a few TB of storage and wanted redundancy. Spinny disks were a much more affordable option than SSDs, and minipcs and Rpis tend to not have much space for those drives. You can add on storage to them, but then they just become clunkier and more expensive than the old PC I already had laying around. Power consumption is probably a few watts higher on the PC than a Pi would be, but it's not terrible.

That's why I went the direction I did. I'm 3 about or 4 months in, and it's been solid so far.

i3 6100 is on the lower end, but it depends on what you plan to do with it.

Is it going to be a general purpose file server? A media server through jellyfin, etc.? If a media server, do you need to transcode?

I think they should be roughly in a similar range for selfhosting?! They're both power-efficient. And probably have enough speed for the average task. There might be a few perks with the ThinkCentre Tiny. I haven't looked it up but I think you should be able to fit an SSD and a harddrive and maybe swap the RAM if you need more. And they're sometimes on sale somewhere and should be cheaper than a RasPI 5 plus required extras.

If power consumption isn't a huge deal, then an Intel-based Mini PC. This will allow you to do transcoding for streaming as well as any other more CPU-intensive task. It also gives you stellar USB 5Gb support which can be used for quite a large storage pool. I'm running a 5x 16TB ZFS pool on an Intel-based Lenovo mini PC. It's in a multi-bay USB box. Unfortunately AMD's pre-Zen 5 USB controllers aren't reliable for this use case which is why I recommend Intel. Pre-Zen 5 AMD-based mini PCs might be OK with one disk per USB port, but as soon as you peg a USB port to its limit, you start running into USB resets.

If you want something more capable that will handle more experimentation, go for the mini PC. If you know exactly what you want to host and you want to prioritize low power consumption, the pi might be a better choice.

I'd probably go for a mini PC, like one from System76. It does have Linux on it (Pop_OS!), but I think you could manage with that in particular.

That depends on what you are running on it. The Pi 5 will be one of the most energy efficient options, but it's limited to USB and PCIe 2.0 x1 with an adapter for storage.

I'm running a home space with jellyfin and navidrome on a Pi5. Until now it's been perfectly fine playing local and normally streaming to a single device at a time. The online support and off the shelf peripheries for troubleshooting the pi is also great!

I went to plug a 5TB drive into the pi the other day and it unmounted the SSD that was already plugged in. To me this is a sign that it is not build to handle more rigorous tasks (e.g. streaming to multiple devices, whilat performing a back up).

I probably won't be swapping the system anytime soon, but I would go for a refurbed mini PC if I could go back in time.