I have my eye on the Orange Pi 5 8GB as my first SBC to selfhost with. These would be the roles for the SBC:
- Jellyfin with 4K
- Some *arr services
- Host own domain site
- Pi-Hole
- Google Photos alternative?
- Probably more I guess
- Be low-power consuming
What’s your take on this? Is 8GB enough?
I’d get a used thinkcentre tiny, many have 2 RAM slots and an SSD that you can upgrade too.
I don’t know how powerful the pi 5 is but I think any thinkcentre would be better IMO.
Hmm x86 consumes a fare bit more power for a 24/7 build, but I could consider it.
Yes and more RAM and an SSD will consume a bit more too. Still wouldn’t be very much I think.
Will this be your first server? If so, start small. It’s inevitable you will want to upgrade something when you have your build almost complete.
Yeah this will be my first, but I’m happy if this would be an overkill.
Overkill and low power consuption are opposites. There is a lot of community support for pi builds so I would start there.
I know that the orange pi 5 is one of the quickest arm processors out there, but it will not compare to x86, and if you grab ryzen 3 or 11th gen intel or newer, they are way more power efficient than older used business/enterprise hardware. Arm has no virtualization, which you WILL get into as you grow. Running one, two, maybe three of those services should be fine, but more than that and I feel like you will probably start running into performance issues on the pi. If you find one for a deal, go for it, I found I out grew my arm sbc pretty quick but would be an amazing and cheap place to learn.
Jellyfin is probably the difficult one. Consider putting that on a seperate server that you can start when you need it. A lot of the rest should fit on the orange pi. Be aware that ARM isnt super well supported, so you may run into compatibility issues.
