Mini PC Home Server

Hardware Hub
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Coming from “Can we build a Home Server out of mini pcs?”.

The video is a bit old now, and I have read that MinisForum has basically no bios or software support, not even for security updates and vulnerabilities. So I think the must be someone with a recommnedation for a NUC form factor home server, preferably from AMD but as far as I looked the Asus NUC is the only real option for something with some level of support.

So the recommendations and help I’m looking for can be sum up in these 3 questions:

  1. A recommendation for mini PC form factor (usage with home assistant, cameras, a hub, a NAS solution, and a learning tool as this will be my first like NAS experience)?
  2. A recommendation for a enclosure for the HDD? I doubt Wendell recommendation from the video is still the user’s choice today given the things he said back then.
  3. And I wrong for wanting to mimic him in that video? I don’t have a big house, and I’ll move in a year.

I’m located in Spain, if that matters.

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Welcome to the forum!

I wouldn’t worry much about firmware updates. Just get something that works alright and it’s up to your OS to handle the security part.

I personally don’t trust Asus product, but that’s just me. I only go with Asrock, MSI and Gigabyte (maybe a few others too). MSI makes cute little boxes like Cubi 5, or the DP20Z (that I bought for my nieces, they run 5600g’s). Asrock makes the DeskMini X300, which is a little larger.

But we need to address the elephant in the room. What you’re planning to run on it and what are your requirements? Home Assistant and a few cameras can easily run off of an Odroid N2+ (it’s the official Home Assistant platform, called Home Assistant Blue - I have one, but not for HomAss). But if you need a (really low-powered) NAS, something like a RockPro64 would be a good option for 4 SSDs (or 2 HDD and 2 SSD, but you need to build your own PSU to power both) and it could probably power HomAss while being a NAS and a target storage for cameras (assuming you don’t have too many cameras).

From some kinda negative experience I’ve had with SBC enclosures just recently (disassembling my rockpro64 and putting it back and assembling an odroid h3 type-3 case), I’d suggest you stick to jankier solutions that will protect your drives, like 3.5" → 2x 2.5" hotswap bays, or 2x 5.25" → 8x 2.5" or 3x 5.25" → 4x 3.5" bays and wire the sata data and power cables on the outside (something kinda like zimablade does).

Spain is a good place for window sill solar panels to power your low powered devices. That whole website I just linked runs off of a Olinuxino LIME2 (I don’t think it’s powerful enough to run as a NAS for camera feeds, but it’s enough to power that website) completely off of solar.

My own infrastructure runs on 12V (although still on the grid), but it’s easy to carry out, my whole lab is smaller than my large threadripper build in an antec p101 silent case (and probably lighter too, although I only have myself to blame for the TR build - heavy motherboard, heavy Noctua copper and aluminum heatsink, heavy steel case etc.).

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I’d highly disagree on that BIOS support one, far from everything can be patched from the OS and there will be bugs ™ so support is important at least if you care about security and/or functionality.

@Raizan
As TheGuyB said it kinda depends on what you’re looking for, the Odroid H4 Plus with their own case isn’t a bad a solution at all given price and functionality. If you’ll use tops 4 3.5" HDDs that is.The major issue with SFF computers is that there’s no internal expandability, driving storage off USB is far from great and will very likely cause random weird issues. In theory you could do some yanky solution with routing SATA/eSATA cables externally and using an external PSU but you’re better off setting a mini/mid tower solution in that case as space saving wont be much in the end and the cost for working around the issue will add up quickly.

For a small home NAS 16Gb of RAM will be more than enough even if you want to run Home Assistant in a VM (HaOS) which is supported by the Odroid H4 platform.

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I’d highly disagree on that BIOS support one, far from everything can be patched from the OS and there will be bugs ™ so support is important at least if you care about security and/or functionality.

@Raizan
As TheGuyB said it kinda depends on what you’re looking for, the Odroid H4 Plus with their own case isn’t a bad a solution at all given price and functionality. If you’ll use tops 4 3.5" HDDs that is.The major issue with SFF computers is that there’s no internal expandability, driving storage off USB is far from great and will very likely cause random weird issues. In theory you could do some yanky solution with routing SATA/eSATA cables externally and using an external PSU but you’re better off setting a mini/mid tower solution in that case as space saving wont be much in the end and the cost for working around the issue will add up quickly.

For a small home NAS 16Gb of RAM will be more than enough even if you want to run Home Assistant in a VM (HaOS) which is supported by the Odroid H4 platform. I’d personally have a look at FreeBSD which offers good documentation but you can of course run whatever you want.

If you go for the Odroid H4 Plus you might also want to add M.2 4×1 Card – ODROID for futher expansion of either storage or other types of PCIe devices.

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Whats the point in small form factor if you need an additional enclosure? Get a case where everything fits. Smaller in total.

I like the NAS cases from Silverstone. Small volume and packed with as much stuff as possible to stay small. I got the CS381 to get all my HDDs inside a single box.

https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/server-nas/?filter=NAS_chassis

If you stick to SSDs, space requirement is significantly reduced as HDDs use up a lot of space.

For pre-built NAS…QNAP and Synology have a long history in selling NAS to consumers, with Apps and stuff ready to not to have to do anything other than pay :slight_smile:

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I don’t see you making much smaller than this with 4x NVME and 4x 3.5" HDDs :slight_smile:

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That’s quite space-efficient. Without the HDDs, can be cut to a fraction. Cheapo case, but it’s supposed to be very low budget stuff. I like it.

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Having used Reddit years ago, the first time I got interested in NAS, and receiving little to no replies and coming to this amount of replies is amazing.

@ThatGuyB
I do care a bit about the bios because as far as I have seen it doesn’t matter, until it does - but I’m an amateur honestly so maybe I’m caring too much.

About the elephant: I currently have my data in external storage and barely do any backing because it is a hassle to do it, I also dread using different devices because my date is all over the place OR in only one place; currently what I am interested in the most is a NAS to be able to move between my laptop, phone, future tablet, future desktop and future android tv box. I have moved out of my parents recently and I finally have agency over my home so I wanted the NAS to be, as a bonus, capable to set Home Assistant (I’m liking the whole wi-fi lighting for example), maybe start using the Plex alternative to actually watch TV again, and learning more about Linux since I left it off 6 years ago after setting an arch linux device (which makes me consider I should go with Synology since that was time consuming). My reply is all over the place, I know, but essentially, I want to do what a Synology can BUT have read and seen in videos that Synology and QNAP are easy solutions from a hands-on perspective but lacking firepower and pricier as a setback.

@diizzy
I’ll take a look at Odroid, first time hearing it from you two (or maybe heard about it but haven’t seen it written instead). I was thinking about 4 3.5 or 2.5 HDDs for the enclosure since the electric bill is included in my rent until I move again next year - as they are less expensive up front than SSDs but I may need to recheck prices honestly since last time I went deep into getting a NAS was 2018.

@Exard3k (New users can only mention 2 persons - edit):
I moved from my parents and currently I’m living in a small floor. I’ll need to move again next year, so it is actually easier to place/hide 2 small boxes than one big one. I also care about sound levels when sleeping since I can’t drop it in a basement or attic and forget it so the NUCs shown in Level1techs videos resparkled me wanted to get into it. In 2018 I know the answer was exactly what you are saying but as far as I can recall you can’t mimic the noise levels of NUCs with consumer parts wrapped in your own solution.

I wanted to avoid Synology for many reasons, but maybe I’m just delusional since there is a beauty to just plug and play when you are busy with your actual work.

To all:
I need to read all the replies in this thread properly and check each thing you said, this is just a reply to let you know I will and I’m thankful for your time, but it is midnight right now. I appreciate such a good welcome into the forum. By the way, I haven’t built a desktop PC yet - lacked space, mentioning this to put into perspective my “level/experience”.

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In that case ODROID-H4 Case Type 3 – ODROID :slight_smile:

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I have one of these, it’s great! Being able to pick and upgrade with regular desktop CPUs and RAM kits is quite nice. It also fits 2x NVMe + 2x 2.5" drives. I have a low profile Noctua cooler in mine. That’s enough storage for a humble NAS. And with a AMD *G processor you can have decent integrated graphics

Mini itx with a minimal volume case is out of mini pc territory, but puts you in the realm of being a having an impressively compat PC with standardized parts.

I want to like the many ARM SBCs, but they seem to frequently need non-mainline kernels which is a PITA.
Edit: I see the Odroid H4 is x86, nice :slight_smile: ]

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If you use stuff like armbian, alpine, nixos, gentoo or void, you don’t need to stray from the default kernel the repos offer you (well, aside from gentoo where you make your own anyway). Just don’t buy the latest and greatest. I’ve had issues at first with the odroid n2+ and hc4 about 2 years ago (and they weren’t even that new back then), but since about a year ago, everything is really smooth. I’d assume things like radxa rock 5 would have similar issues right now, until mainline support comes.

Or if you’re brave enough, look for a SBC that is supported by FreeBSD or OpenBSD. If they’re supported there, they’ll be first-class citizens.

So is the h3 (the older model). There’s also a few others that I don’t own, like zimaboard / zimablade, lattepanda and others (so I can’t vouch for them).

If you want the x86_64 experience and you want better firmware support, then asrock, msi and gigabyte are good options. If you don’t care about that, odroid h3 / h4 series are decent for what they are at their price points. If you don’t mind aarch64 and u-boot, go with fairly supported boards like rockpro64, odroid n2+ and a few others.

I was personally looking at the raxda rock 5, but can’t recommend it over the odroid h4. The price just isn’t right for the rock 5.

Despite my struggle with the h4 (base model), I still highly recommend it. The h3+ has been a more flawless experience for me (just that I’ve struggled when switching from a type 2 to a type 3 case).

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Zima* and Latte* seems to have zero aftermarket support, I’d highly recommend to avoid those since you will run into issues and you already have security issues out of the box.

As much as I’d like to say that ARM is nice and all it’s still a bit of a pain to some extent and 4G of RAM is a bit barebones if you want to do something more than just run Samba. The newer Rockchip SoCs have decent support but you more or less need to follow bleeding edge which can be troublesome in some circumstances.

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I went down your rabbit hole and the whole thing is so confussing (to me). Like I started reading and Odroid seems amazing, yet at one point it started to become so hard… For the first time in my life, I said “maybe prebuilts with software support are for me”, guess that is a sign that professional work is consuming me. Thank you for letting me know, it is amazing, so many applications, great cost, probably this is a fit for me if there wasn’t likely a learning curve that maybe I can’t take on anymore. I don’t know, will keep thinking and checking back on this thread but thanks for presenting this path to me.

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I’ll go deeper into your recommendations now that I informed myself more on Odroid.

I’m also in a circle of realizing that you are correct about one chassis being the right approach for anyone sensical (and with more space than me but still there are so much savings). I had been hearing for a while about Linus saying there is an incoming solution for less hands on into NAS and servers that interest me more and more (with your own built instead of synology for example as far as I understand).

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Because it is. It’s a tinkerer’s low-budget dream of individuality and possibilities. Much as other SBCs during the last years…having the technology to make stuff even smaller while still having plenty of horsepower to run basic things.

I wouldn’t call it a beginner platform. Although you can learn a lot working with SBCs. It is many things, but not your conservative care-free low-budget/small form factor platform of choice.

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True. As far as hardware or software total newbies, it’s not. But it’s easy to get started (well, the h4+ or ultra are), because they’re just x86_64 cpus and you can run whatever on them (like OpenMediaVault or Proxmox).

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Ok, now with the whole Odroid thing your post was digestible.

So between my options for a cheap home server I have a NUC of any kind, or an Odroid, or a custom pc all in one. If I just want a NAS then the same applies but can also add synology and the other brands. After checking processor pricing, NUC pricing, synology pricing and odroid pricing I’m left with a question:

If I did a Odroid H4 Ultra build, and learnt the ropes, how close can I get with just that one solution to make that device my router, vpn, home assistant, pihole, NAS and plex solution (I never can remember the better plex alternative nowadays) because I’m curious whether if I go DIY I will be better off with a N100 device or H4 for routing, vpn and pihole and another one for home assistant, plex and NAS. Obviously I agree one solution and chassis is better but I don’t know if all in one is “safe” and if I can put OPNsense along the rest of the things needed in only one device.

I see synology (for example) worth more than ever but at the same time the DIY side is so compelling from saving money to doing something that works better for a niche situation.

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I’d keep the router and VPN as a separate box. It doesn’t need to be expensive. I’m using a rockpro64 as my main router and previously I’ve been using a raspberry pi 3. The only reason I upgraded was to have gigabit inter-vlan routing. You won’t be running OPNsense (at best OpenWRT / FreeBSD, or at worst some bare Linux distro).

However, if you really want to go the forbidden router variant, you can get the odroid h4 ultra with a type-3 case (the one with support for 4x sata SSDs and a m.2 4x gigabit NIC). Run proxmox on it and pass through the m.2 NIC to an OPNsense VM.

Since people might be wondering, here's the lspci output for the h4 base model

Note: the h4 ultra should have similar output, with maybe the sata controller in a shared space, not allowing for the whole controller passthrough, although one should be able to pass individual disks, if needed - I advise against that generally, just make a zpool on proxmox).

# doas lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 4678
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N [UHD Graphics]
00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Device 467e
00:0a.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Platform Monitoring Technology (rev 01)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N PCH USB 3.2 xHCI Host Controller
00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N PCH Shared SRAM
00:15.0 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Device 54e8
00:15.1 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Device 54e9
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N PCH HECI Controller
00:1a.0 SD Host controller: Intel Corporation Device 54c4
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 54ba
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 54bb
00:1c.6 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 54be
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N PCI Express Root Port #9
00:1e.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N Serial IO UART Host Controller
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N PCH eSPI Controller
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N PCH High Definition Audio Controller
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N SMBus
00:1f.5 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N SPI (flash) Controller
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Controller I226-V (rev 04)
04:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Micron Technology Inc 2550 NVMe SSD (DRAM-less) (rev 01)

With the m.2 slot in its own iommu group, you should be able to passthrough. Same for the ethernet controller (and the h4+ and ultra come with 2 NICs, so you should technically be able to pass these to OPNsense and make a virtual NIC for proxmox, but you’d need a USB NIC temporarily to connect to proxmox to configure it, then have the router VM power on automatically, so you can access it - it’s jank and I hate it, but it’s doable).

# doas lspci -nnk
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:4678]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N [UHD Graphics] [8086:46d1]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Video
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: i915
        Kernel modules: i915
00:08.0 System peripheral [0880]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:467e]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
00:0a.0 Signal processing controller [1180]: Intel Corporation Platform Monitoring Technology [8086:467d] (rev 01)
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: intel_vsec
        Kernel modules: intel_vsec
00:14.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N PCH USB 3.2 xHCI Host Controller [8086:54ed]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd
        Kernel modules: xhci_pci
00:14.2 RAM memory [0500]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N PCH Shared SRAM [8086:54ef]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
00:15.0 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:54e8]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: intel-lpss
        Kernel modules: intel_lpss_pci
00:15.1 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:54e9]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: intel-lpss
        Kernel modules: intel_lpss_pci
00:16.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N PCH HECI Controller [8086:54e0]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: mei_me
        Kernel modules: mei_me
00:1a.0 SD Host controller [0805]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:54c4]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: sdhci-pci
        Kernel modules: sdhci_pci
00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:54ba]
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: pcieport
00:1c.3 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:54bb]
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: pcieport
00:1c.6 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:54be]
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: pcieport
00:1d.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N PCI Express Root Port #9 [8086:54b0]
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: pcieport
00:1e.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N Serial IO UART Host Controller [8086:54a8]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: intel-lpss
        Kernel modules: intel_lpss_pci
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N PCH eSPI Controller [8086:5481]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
00:1f.3 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N PCH High Definition Audio Controller [8086:54c8]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Sound
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
        Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel, snd_sof_pci_intel_tgl
00:1f.4 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N SMBus [8086:54a3]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: i801_smbus
        Kernel modules: i2c_i801
00:1f.5 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-N SPI (flash) Controller [8086:54a4]
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7270]
        Kernel driver in use: intel-spi
        Kernel modules: spi_intel_pci
02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation Ethernet Controller I226-V [8086:125c] (rev 04)
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:0000]
        Kernel driver in use: igc
        Kernel modules: igc
04:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller [0108]: Micron Technology Inc 2550 NVMe SSD (DRAM-less) [1344:5416] (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Micron Technology Inc Device [1344:1100]
        Kernel driver in use: nvme

I doubt you can do this with a synology and its absolutely proprietary OS.

I’d say that once you get the hang of proxmox, it’s easy to get started with any number of VMs or LXC containers, including a home assistant, pi-hole and others. Proxmox can serve as a NAS if you make it a NFS and SMB server.

The only question arising then for a forbidden router, is how well proxmox would run off of an emmc drive (freebsd seems to be just fine on my h3+ on emmc - for now). But if you have a separate router (idk, a thinkpenguin TPE-1400 running librecmc?), then you can dedicate the whole h4 ultra to just virtualization and serving as a NAS (the NAS part uses very little resources).

I don’t remember your requirements, other than wanting to have a portable setup. I’ll take a picture of my setup tomorrow maybe, to show you what I’ve got an how small it can get. With just what you enumerated (home assistant, pi-hole and plex / jellyfin, an h4 ultra is more than plenty, with the caveat that you’d need to run jellyfin or plex in a lxc container running the same intel linux driver as proxmox and allowing the container to access the GPU to get the GPU acceleration working, for transcoding - I believe there’s tutorials online).

I’ll admit, synology makes plex setups easier, but with jellyfin you have to add random online repos to it and get into a bunch of other stuff to get it working. And plex requires you to pay for GPU acceleration IIRC. So if you want to save a buck and don’t mind getting your hands dirty, jellyfin in proxmox is a good option.

Alternatively, you can install jellyfin straight onto proxmox (no containers or VMs) and it should work just fine and be less of a hassle.

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