Hey,
I’m working on building a compact, efficient, and budget-friendly home server to centralize my scattered data and host a few lightweight services.
Currently, my data is spread across multiple hard drives, and accessing it is a hassle. A while back, I set up a home server using an old netbook running Debian and a few Docker containers. It was a fun Linux learning experience, but not a long-term solution (its RAM can’t be expanded beyond 2 GB, and its CPU is too weak). So, I guess it’s time for an actual dedicated server machine!
Budget: Around €500, including storage (I’m in Europe, btw)
Requirements:
- Centralized storage for data, photos, and phone backups
- Run lightweight containers for web services like Immich, Paperless-ngx, Pi-hole, and custom services I’ve developed
- Occasionally download Linux ISOs (I use and delete them; the whole *arr stack would be overkill for my needs)
- No need for virtualization (so no Proxmox, TrueNAS, or Unraid); a plain Debian install with Docker should suffice (or maybe I could use OpenMediaVault)
- No closed OS: I’m not interested in Synology, QNAP, or similar. I want full control to install and customize my OS
Goals:
- Low power consumption: ≤10 watts idle without HDDs would be ideal (this is my number-one priority)
- Low noise
- Compact size: space is limited, so it needs to be small (I also don’t need a huge case for just a couple of drives)
Ideas:
- DIY Option (ASRock N100DC-ITX):
- CPU + Mobo: ASRock N100DC-ITX (~€138)
- RAM: Kingston ValueRAM 16GB 3200MHz DDR4 Non-ECC CL22 (€32.99)
- SSD (for OS and containers): Patriot P320 128GB NVMe PCIe Gen 3x4 (€15.99)
- PSU: LEICKE PSU 19V, 4.74A, 90W (€19.99)
- Case: Sharkoon QB ONE (€50)
- Total: ~€257
- Concerns: Will the 4-pin connector on the board be able to power two HDDs? ASRock includes a cable to power 2 HDDs in the package, so it should be fine, and I don’t plan on adding more drives
- DIY Option (ODROID H4+):
- CPU + Mobo: ODROID H4+ (€196)
- RAM: Crucial RAM 16GB 4800MHz DDR5 Non-ECC CL40 (€48.90)
- SSD (for OS and containers): Patriot P320 128GB NVMe PCIe Gen 3x4 (€15.99)
- PSU: LEICKE PSU 19V, 4.74A, 90W (€19.99)
- Case: ODROID H4+ Case Type 4 (€44.90)
- Accessories: 2x SATA data and power cables (€14.00)
- Total: ~€340
- Concerns: I’m unsure about reliability and updates, and with 2 HDDs, it’s out of my budget
- Prebuilt Option (AOOSTAR R1):
- Specs: N100, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB NVMe
- Total: ~€238
- Concerns: Power consumption might be higher than the ASRock and ODROID boards; I’m unsure about its reliability and updates; I’ve read that it can get noisy and heat up
Storage:
For storage, I’m planning to use two 4 TB HDDs (Seagate IronWolf, ~€120 each) in a mirrored configuration. I’m considering ZFS for its compression, deduplication, snapshots, and bit rot protection. However, I’m unsure if I really need RAID since I’ll perform regular backups.
Questions:
- Which of these options would you recommend?
- Are there better hardware options within my budget that meet my power/noise/size goals?
- Do you have other suggestions for hardware or software I might have overlooked?
Any advice or feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance :)
I wouldn’t go ARM unless you really like tinkering with stuff.
I bought a used Celeron J4105-based system years ago for <100€ and it’s doing just fine. The N100 is its successor that should be better in every way.
Don’t be afraid to buy cheap used hardware. Especially things like RAM or cases that don’t really ever break in normal usage.
Two 4TB HDDs for 120€ each is a rip-off. That’s twice what you pay per GB in high capacity drives. Even in the lower capacity segment you can do much better such as 6TB for 100€.
If you have proper (tested!) backups and don’t have any specific uptime requirements, you don’t need RAID. I’d recommend getting one 16TB-20TB drive then. That would only cost you as much as those two overpriced 4TB drives.
I believe you should buy second hand hardware for that. Can’t beat the price and you’ve tons of gamers and offices trying to get rid of perfectly good hardware for what you’re trying to do. I mean a 8th gen i5 CPU will most likely be idle or in low usage most of the time.
I would say to buy i5-8500T or more recent (because you can run a full machine on 8W on that). You can either go for a micro ATX motherboard with that and RAM second hand OR pick an HP Mini ProDesk with the same CPU, both options will be about 130€. Check this example.
The thing with the Minis from HP is that they come with everything, NVME, power supply, ram and ready to go. Most of those more recent machines come with 2x NVME + 1 SATA + USB-C.
If you’re comfortable with taking the board out of the case you can place it anywhere and add a M2 to SATA adapter on both NVME slots for about 22€ each and have like 12 SATA HDDs connected to it. If you don’t want mess with the hardware you can get a USB DAS for your disks, since it’s all USB-C you will not notice any performance impact.
Those machines will outperform your CPU pick by a lot while being cheaper and power efficient on idle.
+1 on this idea, going to toss in my recommendation for an AMD 5600g second hand. Its basically a laptop CPU with built in GPU that handles my jellyfin transcoding without issue and has a super low idle power rating if you pair it with a quality, small PSU.
Yeah, laptop CPUs are low power, after all they’re configured to run on battery with Windows. :)
Thanks! Yes, I’ve considered second-hand hardware, especially mini PCs like the one you linked, for their low power consumption. The issue for me is that they typically only have one SATA port and no space for 3.5" HDDs (only 2.5"). As you mentioned, I could probably take the board out of the case, but can it be mounted in a standard ATX case? The board layout doesn’t seem to follow standard dimensions…
In fact, I already have a mini PC (an MSI Cubi 2 with an i3-7100) that I sometimes use. I’m sure it’s fairly power-efficient, but again, it only has room for one 2.5" HDD, which limits its usefulness for a NAS setup :(
Another concern I have with second-hand hardware is what happens if something breaks. Is there any warranty? With new hardware, I can simply send it back and get a replacement, which gives me more peace of mind.
They usually have M2/NVMe slots, those can be turned into SATA port easily and cheap in multiple ways:
- Add 6 SATA ports to a M2 slot for 22€ with a board like the one I linked above
- Convert the M2 slot into a full PCIe slot
- Use a riser to move the port to outside the machine, like this ribbon cable or that one that uses a USB cable
There are A LOT of ways to convert the M2/NVME slots into SATA ports, some you can get hundreds of hard drives there if you need.
In fact, I already have a mini PC (an MSI Cubi 2 with an i3-7100) that I sometimes use. I’m sure it’s fairly power-efficient, but again, it only has room for one 2.5" HDD, which limits its usefulness for a NAS setup :(
Again, that board has a M2 slot, just use it. OR you can use of this cards to expand that 1 sata port into multiple ones.
what happens if something breaks. Is there any warranty?
If you exclude the Chinese brands (including Lenovo) it is very, very unlikely that a Mini HP or Dell will break in your hands anytime soon. Some even come with extended warranties from companies that bought them and you’ll be able to ask HP for help. But frankly I wouldn’t bother with this, those machines are good hardware designed for 24h7 operation and will not break easily.
Exactly. And I’d rather go M.2 -> SATA instead of USB -> SATA.
Note that the adapter on the link does not actually use the USB protocol. It’s still PCIe sent over a USB 3.0 cable that is good enough for the job. But not actually USB, there are no signal / protocol conversions happening.
This is a decent setup if you want to leave the Mini PC intact, with the case and all because it allows you to route the PCIe to outside of the machine using a somewhat solid cable that you can run through a small hole OR the optional port slot (VGA on this machine):
The VGA card can be removed so you have a big hole to pass the “USB” cable through.
That’ll do the trick. Get yourself a powered USB hub and connect a bunch of SSDs to it, then jam the hub into your mini PC. You’ve now got yourself a NAS in all ways except looks.
This was great and thanks for your recommendation!!
A used i5-8500T or similar sounds pretty good, actually. Idk about Europe, but in the US you can get them second hand for like $30 on ebay. Seems like you can also find Passive coolers for that socket too on ebay, if you really want.
If you can find an ITX board that has the correct socket second hand, then you’d be good to go, and have options for expansion, if its got a pcie slot.
I’ve got a NAS built with used parts and its been fine for me so far. Its not as low power as yours, but the components were cheap enough that I could spend more on storage. And when its just idling, I don’t think it uses that much power (Never actually measured the power consumption at the plug. Its a Ryzen 3200g) but it sits at like 2% CPU usage most of the time with the host OS and 3 VMs running.
They’re selling around 40-50€ here just the CPU, with motherboard and RAM for about 100€ and mini pcs with those around 150€.
If you go that route I’d want to make sure the cpu is at least somwewhat recent.
My first server was an old office PC I bought used as well, but I had real problems with it, because the CPU was lacking some X86 instructions which is why I could not run a specific service I wanted to as it used those. (And if you want to run jellyfin in the near future you should make sure to buuy a cpu that can also do some hardware encoding/decoding as doing that in software on a low end CPU can make the experience somewhat sluggish.
Totally, but that won’t be a problem if you’re 8th+ gen right now. I’ve had experiences like you describe with a Core 2 Duo about two years ago, even SSH was taking ages to connect because the CPU lacked some modern instruction for ECDH.
I recommend going with an N100 based system if you want low power usage. I doubt old workstations that support multiple drives idle near 10W, the mini PC variants might, but they would require a DAS for the HDD’s.
I have personally chosen an ASUS N100I-D D4 motherboard with a m.2 to 6x SATA card and it has been working fairly well.
I own an HP Proliant micro server gen 8. Sweet machine. I bought it new, but there are plenty used around, great looking device. A real pro server in a small format. Celeron, but you can find i3, i5, or i7, and can take some specific xeons. 4 real HP drive caddies.an extra sata originally for a CD, that can repurposed for an SSD, and USB3 in case you want to add even more drives. Very low power consumption. I have xpenology installed, because of the polished experience, but you can install any NAS OS you want. Xpenology has a ton of apps you can install, and also does docker.
A cheap laptop might also be worth considering? Built in UPS that way, and sometimes UPSes have a large standby power usage. Would support a couple of bus powered drives as well.
Main drawback is no recovery if the battery drains fully.
Thank you! When I set up the server with the old netbook I mentioned in the post, it was mainly because of the built-in UPS, which was very convenient.
However, the main issue with laptops is that they typically only support one drive at most. I know it’s possible to hack something together with splitters or external boards, but I’m not a fan of relying on a hacky solution for something like this. Plus, the server will be placed in a visible area of my house, so I need to consider aesthetics as well and go with something that looks at least somewhat nice.
Righto :)
I was thinking of usb3 hard drives. No need for internal storage if using spinning rust.
On older laptops with optical drives you can sometimes replace the drive with a sata tray and add a second drive that way.
But yes, a server that looks like a server and can recover after power loss is useful.
Earlier this year I built something similar, although with more space for hard drives:
I used the following components:
Mainboard Topton N100 (AliExpress) This is actually a BKHD 1264 NAS 136,69 € RAM 16 GB Crucial DDR5-4800 (Mindfactory) 40,78 € Case Jonsbo N2 (???) 138,83 € PSU 300 W bequiet SFX Power 3 (Mindfactory) 50,39 € M.2 system drives 2 X 128 GB Patriot P.300 (Mindfactory) 25,78 € 392,47 € For storage I bought used 4 TB drives from ebay for around 40 € each.
Now the system is running 5 x 4 TB in RAID 6 as well as a 256 SATA SSD I had laying around as cache.
The system is using 25 Watts in idle with those 5 HDDs, 1 SATA SSD and 2 M.2 SSDs.
It’s a bit more you’ve been asking for but this option would offer you more expandability down there road.
CWWK N100 - $152
1x16GB Teamgroup elite DDR5-5600 = $37
3x2TB Samsung 990 EVO - $255 1x128GB Patriot P300 -$14 (4TB storage + 2TB parity drive and 128GB for OS)
$7 for some heatsinks for the SSDs.
Total = $465 USD
No idea what those prices look like in Europe.
You also have the option of expanding with 2 SATA ports.
Thank you very much for the suggestion! As I mentioned in other comments, an all-flash NAS would be perfect, but unfortunately, prices here are much higher. For example, a single Samsung 990 EVO 2TB costs around 150 euros, so three of them would total ~450 euros. Adding the motherboard, RAM, PSU, and case, I’d be over the budget :(
You don’t need to add a motherboard, case or PSU, the first item is an entire mini PC, minus ram and storage.
The RAM and storage was just a suggestion. Change them up as you prefer.
There’s also another model if you don’t need HDD that comes with an aluminum heatsink/enclosure, for an extra $20.
Honestly, they are all good options. I have the Aoostar prebuilt option for my home server/NAS and I have had zero issues with it. 2 Sata SSD’s and it’s sipping around 12-15W power onload. about 10-11W on idle.
I had the Odroid H3 before that, with same SSD’s, it was using about 11-15W under load and about 8W idle.
Thank you! The R1 was actually the first option I considered, as it has all the benefits of a prebuilt NAS like Synology, plus it allows for a custom OS, which is great. I’m just a little concerned about long-term reliability. Also, is it quiet? I read that you can replace the bottom fan with a Noctua fan, but I’m not sure if it supports PWM.
I’m not really able to answer that question. My unit is in my attic, so I can’t hear it anyhow. I haven’t noticed it overheating during the summer though.
You have listed some good options there👍 One additional possibility: what about repurposing an old enterprise workstation, like Dell Optiplex, HP Elitedesk, Lenovo Thinkcentre etc.? They can be bought for around 50-100 e/$. For a similar use case I’ve been running an Optiplex 7010 SFF (Small form factor) with i5 3XXX and 16G of ddr3 and it has been plenty of powerfull for the purpose.
I seriously doubt those stay below the desired power usage
Don’t forget, disaster recovery with a 7010 is a bobble, as you pull the disks out of one and pop them into the next and you’re likely back up and running.
Or, hell, run two with gluster. ;-)
Isn’t gluster in end-if-life phase now?
Thank you! How much power does your Optiplex draw when idle? Also, how many 3.5" drives can it fit?
One concern I have with repurposing old enterprise workstations is the lack of warranty. As I mentioned in another comment, if something breaks, buying new hardware means I can easily send it back for a replacement…
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I’m sorry if this is not relevant but I don’t have the time to read that whole of text:
I think this is at least similar to what you want to achieve.
Yes! I watched that video, and that solution would be almost perfect. However, an all-flash NAS is out of my budget, a single 4TB SSD (even a cheaper one) costs about the same as two HDDs :(
Ah I get it.
Anyway low consumption kind of mandates that kind of flash build IMO.
Isn’t there any way you could stagger buying those SSD? Like you buy them one by one only on sales or refurbished hardware.
You could also maybe attempt a raid5 only with only 3 disks until you could buy a fourth one?
Anyway good luck!
The best way to meet your low power requirement, which you listed as the most important, is by having flash storage. The other half of this is that used hardware is going to be worse at power management than an SBC too. It may be worth doing the math to see how long the power draw difference will take to even out the cost of using flash storage instead of magnetic storage.
The other part of this is that you could just grab a 2.5" hard drive and split the difference on price/GB. https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/xCKhP6/seagate-barracuda-5tb-25-5400rpm-internal-hard-drive-st5000lm000 start with two, and if you run out of space, or obtain more money, add two more from a different brand.
Just get a cheap old office PC from eBay or local market place for £50. Add your disks using ZFS (don’t use raid as it basically doesn’t work in modern systems). I’d be tempted to get one 4tb internal drive and one external usb to use as your backup drive.
I’d recommend to pay attention to power efficiency. If it’s a random office PC with 80W idle, and OP is living in Europe and paying like 30ct per kWh, that means that computer is going to cost them an extra 200€ anually for the electricity.
And you don’t think, office PCs pay attention to power consumption, given they are intended to run 8h a day?
My optiplex sff runs at about 10-15W in idle, and it’s an i5 6500. The t variant in my elitedesk runs at 5W.
The random office PC with an older i7, no GPU, and two hard drives I was using idled at around 70W. So… it goes either way.
Edit: This was a “standard” ATX tower PC and reading your other comments it sounds like that isn’t what you’re referring to.
It really depends on the model. Best to pay attention to it like the previous comment mentioned.
Yes, I’ve seen a lot of them idling at 45+ watts. With quite some outliers. 80W is not uncommon for what I’ve seen. And you need to attach an energy meter to measure that. The CPUs itself are mostly fine. It’s the mainboard chipset that might do a lot of unnecessary power drain. Plus some other components and the power brick that only has a certain efficiency.
For an office that’s not an issue. They pay like a third for electricity. They’re making good money with the PC being used. And maintenance etc is the major cost factor, not the annual few bucks for electricity.
Sorry, but you’re either pulling those numbers out of your ass or haven’t kept up with the real world for 25 years.
The numbers I’ve posted above are measured using an external meter. I’m German, I have a vested interest in knowing how much power my devices pull.
Idk. I’ll look it up. If that’s true, I’d be interested to replace my trusty old Skylake generation NAS computer. We have a nice shop selling refurbished office computers in town (afbshop.de). Last time I’ve checked it was difficult to get computers <40W idle, because that’s mainly laptops or small form factor computers these days. And those are kind of unsuitable to attach several harddisks. And the Dell/HP/Fujitsu Esprimo workstations needed more power. If that’s changed in the meantime, I think I’d like to buy one.
Do you happen to know about the idle power consumption of graphics cards? Because some of the computers have GPUs and I also always wanted to fit in something like a modern Radeon graphics card to do some machine learning, have Home Assistant talk to me etc. But I’m in the same boat and can’t afford the amount of electricity the American selfhosting community uses for their projects…
But yeah, most computers I measured were kind of old. Not 25yo but old enough to be finally replaced at work, or to be had for really cheap.
Workstations, like real workstations, are another beast and not what’s typically referred to as “office PCs”, those are indeed rather sff builds.
Again, optiplex sff 3060 as an example, it has two SATA ports, one x16 and one x1 (I think) PCIe, and looking at the PCB, apparently there’s a version with m.2 slots. Sure, not exactly server grade storage, but if you manage to find some version with m.2 slots or invest 10€ for a cheap SATA card, you can get enough storage attached.
GPU wise, absolutely no idea. My optiplex has a wx3100 that I got for cheap and its self reported power draw never goes under 5W, but since this machine is a desktop, it doesn’t run all day.
Ah, alright. I can see how these things idle at 15W. Or an comparable amount to a laptop. That might do it for OP. I don’t think that’s what I’m looking for, though. I need like 3 or 4 SATA ports plus maybe 2 spare for future upgrades. Hence my “compact” is a small midi tower.
Honestly a raspberry pi or equivalent on diet pi (https://dietpi.com/) is probably a good start. Though with the caveat that you should use its internal utilities to create an off-site backup of your most important data via a provider such as hetzner.
Cheap, low power, and diet pi is Debian with some tweaks so it’s very easy to set up either bare metal or via containers (as others have said containers may help manage things easier and safer in the long run).
For storage, you’ll probably either need an externally powered USB dock (30ish EUR) or a powered 3.5inch HDD dock if you go this route as the pi cannot reliably power even one SSD from its USB ports - you’ll risk IO failures. The same will come from any setup that includes any low power SBC just for stability. In my experience it’s still less than 15W but you need stable power for IO stuff on SSDs.
For HW I personally use a NUC. If I were to build something today within said budget, I’d go for a second hand thin client.
For example the Thinkcentre M720q Tiny I can buy for 225EUR, coming with 8th gen core i5, 8GiB RAM, 256GiB SSD (1). Idle consumption is around 5W.
Thank you! Yeah, I considered NUCs and mini PCs in general as well. The issue is that, like laptops, they typically support only one drive out of the box. Adding more drives often requires hacky solutions or relying on USB drives, but I’d prefer to avoid USB and stick with SATA for a more reliable setup.
HDD’s use quite a lot of power and take up a lot of space. I would recommend using SSD’s if you have the budget for it.
I don’t think ssds would be viable with a total budget of 500€ and the need for >=8Tb of storage.
Yeah, an SSD-only NAS would be the dream, but as I mentioned in another comment, it’s out of my budget, one 4TB SSD costs as much as two HDDs :(
I’ve been running my Aoostar R1 for over a year now, no issue at all. ~14W at idle with the 2HDD in standby. 32G RAM, a low power SK hynix Gold P31 1TB NVME. I’ve re-used the pair of 14TB HDDs from my WD NAS and recently got a pair of 12TB refurbished HDD for ca 240€ to use the old WD NAS as a backup. I run Proxmox with a bunch of LXC containers (12 mostly) of which a pair of pi-hole, pair of VPN/hardened SSH, fileserver, home automation, Logitech media server, Jellyfin etc etc etc The R1 is not that noisy, never crashed once, does not heat up and is powered through a 88.8Wh mini UPS.
Thank you! Yeah, the R1 is very tempting, but 14W with the HDDs spun down is a little higher than I’d ideally like. Still, it’s reassuring to hear that it’s been reliable for you.
By the way, can you tell me more about the mini UPS you mentioned? It sounds like a great addition, especially for providing backup power to both my router and the NAS.
For the Aoostar I got the 19V version of “UPS Battery Backup, 24000 mAh Intelligent Compact UPS with High Security for Modem (19V)” from Amazon,
and got the exact same in 12V for my router/modem
