I want a single small box that will serve a household of 2-3 people: media streaming (ideally hardware transcoding), Nextcloud for files/photos, and automated backups. I care about low power and low noise, but I also want reliability and versioned backups in case I mess something up. What’s the sweet spot in hardware and software stacks right now, and what are the practical steps to set this up and maintain it?
Here is a 3-tier approach I would consider and would love feedback on:
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Minimal/Low power: Raspberry Pi 5, 8GB RAM, 1TB NVMe on USB-C adapter for system, 4-8TB external HDD for cold backups. Software: Docker + docker-compose, Nextcloud (with external object store if needed), Jellyfin instead of Plex for OSS, Restic or Borg for encrypted backups, rclone for offsite copies. Good for streaming direct play and light use, but expect limited or no reliable transcoding for multiple simultaneous streams.
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Mid-range (recommended for most people): Intel NUC or small Mini-PC with an Intel i5 (10th gen or newer) or AMD Ryzen 5, 16GB RAM, 1TB NVMe OS, 2x HDDs (4-8TB) for media + periodic mirrored backups. Use hardware transcoding (Intel QuickSync) with Jellyfin or Plex. Software stack: Docker, Traefik reverse proxy + Let’s Encrypt, Nextcloud + MariaDB + Redis, Borg/Restic for local snapshots and encrypted offsite to S3/Backblaze via rclone. Add Unattended-upgrades or watchtower for containers, fail2ban, and Netdata for monitoring.
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Small rack/server level: used HP MicroServer or a small tower with ECC support, ZFS on Linux or TrueNAS SCALE if you prefer an appliance. Run VMs/containers so you can isolate services. Use RAID1 or RAIDZ for redundancy but remember RAID is not a backup substitute.
Concrete maintenance checklist / mini-guide:
- Follow 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies, 2 media types, 1 offsite. Local fast backup (snapshots), local cold copy (external rotated drive), offsite encrypted copy (rclone to cloud).
- Init restic example: restic init -r /path/to/repo ; restic backup /data ; restic forget --keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 4 --prune
- Networking: use DHCP reservation or a static IP, set up a reverse proxy (Traefik) so you only expose ports 80/443, or use a tunnel like Cloudflare Tunnel if you hate port forwarding. Always use TLS.
- Security: run containers as unprivileged where possible, use strong passwords and app-specific passwords for Nextcloud, enable 2FA for accounts, enable fail2ban, and keep updates automated.
- Power: get a small UPS to gracefully handle outages. Test restores quarterly so backups are actually usable.
Questions for the crowd: has anyone pushed Raspberry Pi 5 to the point of reliable transcoding for a household of 2-3 people? Is hardware acceleration with Intel QuickSync in Jellyfin/Plex still the easiest path? Any gotchas with rclone + restic workflows or with running Nextcloud in Docker on low-RAM devices?
ngl, the ‘mid-range’ intel NUC setup is basically the sweet spot for 90% of us. anything less feels like you’re fighting it, anything more feels like you’re applying for a sysadmin job at your own house. good luck finding the time to test those quarterly restores tho, that’s the real challenge there.
This is something where I’ve focused more on a NAS form factor since it’s always the drive bays that get you. I’ve looked at Ugreen and Synology as well as a BYO set up. In all cases their software (or TrueNAS or Unraid) is capable of cloud backups and they also support containers for anything else you want to run with more than enough horsepower.
Zimablade/board or 1L used biz pc with an i5 10th Gen or better.
These things pull almost no power and often have room for an m.2 and SATA-SSD.
Personally, I’m just using an old laptop (think it’s 11th gen Intel i5) as a home server. A mini PC seems like a good option if you don’t have an old laptop though.
I also have an older laptop with a 6th gen Intel core i3 and a dead battery that I have to put to good use at some point, but haven’t bothered to do so yet. What should I use it for?
Yunohost has backups
I’ve got a beelink minipc with NextCloud and Jellyfin and external multiTB HDDs. Works for me.
I have an OrangePi5+ for Jellyfin and it works mostly great. There are occasional videos it had trouble transcoding in real time, but that’s rare, and I now pre-transcode any video I put there before watching. I run Opencloud instead of Nextcloud, bit both should work.
has anyone pushed Raspberry Pi 5 to the point of reliable transcoding for a household of 2-3 people?
People definitely have and you can physically do that now… but from experience, you’ll likely be happier doing almost anything else. I wouldn’t consider it if you want those 2-3 streams to occasionally occur simultaneously. Also, reminder that the best plan is to consider ways where you don’t need to transcode and can just utilize direct play.
I started with your tier 3 and moved down to tier 2 because of power costs. I work for an MSP, so I have essentially infinite free last gen hardware from the ecycling pile, but the power consumption was too high. I’m in the process of moving from a Dell 720 rackmount to an HP EliteDesk 800 G5-SFF with 32 gigs of RAM that I put a pair of 4TB drives into, plus the 1TB on-baord NVME. Once I finish this migration I should save on the order of 250 watts, or 6 kWh per day, for a savings of about $40/mo in electricity. It’s worth taking your electric rate into account when you size your hardware, and figure out how long your ROI is for that decision.
For storage, I have a 16-bay rackmount server chassis for my NAS with 8TB drives (see MSP comment above) so I don’t have a good suggestion for consumer-grade hardware there. I know 16 spinning drives are pricey power-wise, but I just can’t give up 100+ TB. I’m pondering adding another DAS shelf to grow the array even further, though that will eat a bunch of the power savings moving off of the 720. For the time being, the inertia of not ordering a PowerVault enclosure is saving me money,
