#Hosting hardware?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

placid salmon
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Hola all,

New to home assistant and building a home lab.

Part of me really wants to get a rack mounted server (ideally silver to be beautiful with the ubiquity gear ✨😂) and use it for a variety of hosting.

I’d host, containerised where possible:

  • home assistant
  • Plex server (with hardware accelerated transcoding)
  • Bitwarden
  • possible use for hosting games, though reasonably this pushes the spec requirements too high and I would easily cut this

Options include:

  • a Mac mini or a Nuc
  • buy some second hand server or computer and repurpose
  • build my own

I built my own gaming desktop, so picking parts is less of the issue compared to delving into the worlds of self hosting and knowing what my requirements will be now and Into the future.

elder walrus
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What's the question exactly? As for hardware I prefer the reverse order you listed. That is if money isn't the issue.

indigo cypress
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I would recommend a second hand mini pc or sff, especially 6th gen intel or onwards off of facebook marketplace or eBay, due to how they are reasonably powerful, have hardware acceleration, have low power consumption, and fit into a small area. They also make very little noise if that is important to you

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Some recs are HP Elitedesks, Dell Optiplex, Lenovo M710q, and the like

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Building your own PC could also work if you want more power, but then the price can start going up, as well as power consumption and noise. However, if you stick to lower power parts, it should be fine

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I think for your use case, if it is going to be running 24/7, you should really factor in power consumption when picking something. In that case, I would recommend the mini or sff PCs, or n100 PCs

late bear
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if you also want a really simple way to host all that stuff and more you could also consider a Synology NAS they're a more smaller form factor and has plenty of power to run whatever you need, though they are expensive but i'd say 100% worth it!

elder walrus
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has plenty of power to run whatever you need
Doubtful.

indigo cypress
placid salmon
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I’m leaning towards a self built rack mounted PC - or a second hand of the same

3RU case seems about right, and then just a psu, cpu, ram, motherboard and drives. It also means I don’t need to buy a NAS and can use that server as a NAS anyway

crystal arrow
# placid salmon I’m leaning towards a self built rack mounted PC - or a second hand of the same ...

I'd just recommend to calculate the energy consumption and the cost associated as well as the noise of the computer beforehand if that is important to you.

Personally i went with Proxmox and running HomeAssistant on a VM instead of containerised via docker. The main concern for me was, that the container solution does not support addons out of the box, and while you can simply spin them up as containers and connect them, it seems that means a whole lot of configuration and difficulty.

Also, while it's certainly possible to backup a container state and restore from that, i found that the possibility of just doing a snapshot of my VM and restoring from that was incredibly easy and helpful when experimenting with devices / configuration / addons and all the other stuff.