I dusted off my RPI4 and started tinkering with self-hosting things and it's sparked a fire. Suddenly I have 7 docker containers running and I need more RAM, more space and I want something reliable with room to grow. I like small form factors but it doesn't need to be RPI small. Any recs for your favorite hardware under $500?
NUCs are great little boxes. I have extensive experience with them. Not a lot of room for RAID or other nice to haves, but besides that even in some pretty bad environments they just happily sit there chugging away year after year.
The fan can get gummed up, but if your environment is at all reasonable it'll probably not be a problem. OTOH, you can buy these massive fanless cases for a NUC that make the whole question moot.
I've replaced fan once. Purchased from Ali. Works like a charm.
The reason why I had to replace fan is because it is CCTV-Viewer host and the app is not using hardware acceleration (not supported). Lots of cameras, CPU is usually around 60-70% 24/7 and temperature usually never drops below 80°c. It's expected in my case.
The other NUC is running 24/7 as media center/home server for the past 2 years and to this day works like a charm.
What specs is yours if you don't mind me asking? I have a 10th hosting Proxmox and 11th hosting ESXi, but both at 32GB. Wondering if I should take the plunge and just upgrade them both max out at 64GB.
Intel® Core™ i7-10710U Processor (12M Cache, up to 4.70 GHz)
512GB NVME SSD, I think it’s Samsung 970 pro
32GB of RAM, I think it’s DDR4-2666 (fastest supported)
I can’t comment on your “Wondering if I should take the plunge” as it highly depends on use-case. At home I am not very into HA as it gets ridiculously expensive (and I am not making money out of my services, such as Jellyfin, Homeassistant, adblocking DNS and so on).
Wow, first I'm exposed to Proxmox, looks really cool. I'm currently handling remote via Cloudflare Tunnels and it's working well but I'd love something that will manage multiple servers in the future and this looks like the ticket.
Well, this is not what I meant "remotelly" 😂. I realised I am too lazy to setup monitoring (Telegraf/VictoriaMetrics/Grafana) so I look into VM metrics in proxmox. Also I can reinstall VM remotelly if I fuck things up - very convenient.