this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
93 points (97.9% liked)

Selfhosted

40134 readers
535 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Hey guys, I'm new to self-hosting; I'm trying to set up cloud storage to store pics and other content. However, I’m unsure whether to use my old computer, Buy NAS or ResberryPie to set up a home server.

Also, what is the best privacy-friendly OS to use with the home server?

Lastly, do’s and don’ts.

Any help would be appreciated (:

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The Raspberry Pi can work if you don't need a lot of space or high performance. You will need an external drive or two for it. The power consumption will be very low too.

You can use an old PC if you need more drives. Just don't use an old gaming PC since the power consumption will be rather high.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You can always just undervolt the cpu and take out the gpu. Sure, a 1000w power supply is going to be inefficient at 20% draw, but if you already have old hardware it isn't always cost effective to replace it just because of a higher power draw.

Also the pi is great for stuff like dns and network storage, but it's going to struggle with transcoding as a media server. I can't speak for the 5 from personal experience, but the 4 was completely incapable as a jellyfin/plex server. I just use an old stripped down computer for media and the pi is relegated to dns adblocking.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

For real time transcoding, you will need a PC with a newer CPU that supports hardware H.265 encoding.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Do you mean 12-bit? Because previous versions have been supported since 2015-2016.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I would still consider an 8 year old CPU to be fairly recent considering performance has only increased a couple percent per generation.
12 bit video is uncommon, so support for it is not really needed. Intel Skylake or newer will work for 8 bit H.265.
If you have any video in 10 bit H.265, you will need a Kaby Lake or newer CPU in order to decode it in hardware. Software H.265 decoding will limit it to 1 or 2 streams depending on the CPU and video quality.