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Comment by stavros

17 days ago

I bought a few used NUCs for $150 each, they're amazing home servers. Much, much faster, more capable, more flexible than a Pi, at only twice the price.

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stavros

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sangnoir  16 days ago

Pi's were never a good for compute-intensive tasks; running a DNS resolver (PiHole), print-server, or uploading backups to the cloud is the sort of thing it excels at. The Pi Zero W costs $15 and idles at less than 1 Watt; it's the always-on-appliance that turns on my GPU-workstation or NUC for the heavier stuff.

distances  17 days ago

What do you use them for? I'm one of those that have Raspberry Pi 5 mostly just for Home Assistant. It's clearly overpowered for that use case, but I wanted the NVMe support. I'm not convinced by these articles -- used x86 box that maybe achieves almost the same low power draw still doesn't have any actual upsides if you don't realistically need that computing power.

  • stavros  17 days ago

    I have one where I deployed K9s so I can learn Kubernetes better, and one where I have deployed Harbormaster (http://harbormaster.readthedocs.io/).

    The Harbormaster one has a bunch of stuff (Zigbee2MQTT, my smart home stuff, my apps, etc. I have a Pi 4 that has Octoprint, services on the NUC load instantly whereas Octoprint feels a bit sluggish.

    The NUC is an x86 (well, amd64) box, with a 10W power draw, which is great. I don't think a desktop PC will do less than 100W...

  • ww520  16 days ago

    I use the mini-pc for running security NVR, git servers, self hosted NextCloud, local hosted LLM models, and backup servers.

    After my branded security camera NVR died for the N times and the company went out of business, I got fed up and decided to run my own NVR. I got a powered switch to provide power and network connection to all the cameras via POE. Connected a mini-pc to the switch and ran Blue Iris on it to stream from all the cameras. Attached an external harddisk enclosure to use some old harddisks for storage. This ensures every piece of the system can be replaced and upgraded separately.

  • kccqzy  17 days ago

    I have a home server that stores and processes all my photos, using PhotoPrism. Things like face recognition does require a bit of a compute. A NUC is perfect for this use case.

    • zimpenfish  17 days ago

      I've got one that does PhotoPrism + other media (sabnzbd, gerbera, flexget) as a general "media storage" box, one that just runs a Minecraft server, and one that's "everything else" (currently Home Assistant, Grafana, Prometheus, my webcam bird detection stuff, NATS, etc.)

      Originally started with HA on a Pi 4 but it wasn't really up to it.