Hi!
I have an old gaming pc (i5 9400F) with 16gb of ram that has been acting as my home server with proxmox. It’s quite large and quite loud and very overpowered for what I’m using it for (home assistant, Minecraft server, some lxc containers) and a mini pc (amd 5800h with 16gb ram).
I want to sell my gaming pc, place the HDD into a NAS (and samba share my plex library), and potentially grab a low powered N100 minipc to pick up the lxc containers and home assistant that my gaming pc is running.
New to self hosting so wondering if this is a good setup or if there are any glaring issues you see with this. What is your setup?
Depends on what you’re doing.
If you want a low-power setup, get a shell with a backplane for 4 drives and an n100 board.
If you want to host games, get an AMD APU on a mini-itx and do the same.
Maybe a 20-40W difference, but the AMD is going to outperform the n100 like a hot knife through butter.
I agree with this, but would like to add for OP that diversifying is not always a bad idea.
I have a NAS that is mainly running as just a NAS with a few containers to help me download and categorize stuff. It has a AMD CPU, so no HW transcoding, so I added a N100 to host Jellyfin on the side. That little NUC can also run HA, Heimdall, PiHole, Tailscale or any lightweight container with ease. I do it with Proxmox LXC’s.
If I wanted to host game servers, I would probably build a server for that on its own anyways, just because it would be more power hungry and need modularity for future upgrades/changes.
I guess the point is that there is no «one server does it all» for me. I prefer to have servers more suitable for their tasks than having one beast doing everything alone. Makes it suck less when stuff breaks too.
Otherwise I think the comment above is on point.