Selfhosted

The greenest/cheapest way is to recycle an old laptop. They're pretty efficient and unless you're transcribing video anything in the past 10 years will be plenty powerful. Also the built-in battery is great in case of a power outage.

Then, just get one of those multi-disk USB HDD enclosure and pop some drives in.

For an OS, I like CasaOS which runs on top of Debain. It is a single-line install, and makes running docker apps very easy, for the services you mentioned and many others it can be set up entirely using the GUI.

Two or more ssds, the biggest you can afford, on a j-bod USB3 or USB-C enclosure. Raid them together on Linux software raid. As hardware, I use a power horse laptop, its more practical, but I had it spare. Buy a nice compromise between CPU power and power comsumpion, that depends on your feelings.

And use Gentoo :)

I have documented most of my steps here https://wiki.gardiol.org

Consider a used HP Elite desk SFF (small form factor) with a 6th Gen or later Intel CPU (or the equivalent from Dell or Lenovo). Space for 2x 3.5 HDD for data, an nvme m.2 slot for your OS drive, and a couple of pcie expansion slots.

1.) it's cheap and replacement parts are plentiful 2.) 6th+ gen Intel CPUs have Quick Sync for hardware accelerated transcoding 3.) fast interface for the OS drive, and room for a pair of multi TB HDDs in raid. 4.) some expandability 5.) power draw isn't horrible, but nor is it great.

OS wise, lots of options. Ubuntu server LTS is my general go to because it's easy to Google stuff for and is stable. And I don't need a desktop environment. I then run the services in docker.

Note about Intel Quick Sync when running headless: you may need a display emulator to get the system to enable it. The HP bios (and maybe some others) don't have the option to permanently enable quick sync. The display emulator tricks it into thinking a display is plugged in. You can get them on Amazon for under $10.

Any sort of tiny/mini/micro, 6th gen Intel or better for jellyfin transcodes.

Usually you can get a laptop HDD plus an nvme in there, but check specs. Put the OS on the nvme drive, use the 2.5" HDD for backups, CEPH, etc.

For the OS I'd use Proxmox and just make each service an LXC.

orange pi looks very promising

A really nice budget option is an old Lenovo or HP mini PC. These days they make thin client style machines that are absolutely tiny, use about as much power as a small laptop, and still have decent spec.

Storage wise, there's room to fit a 2.5" drive inside, and newer ones have NVME slots. You can buy them real cheap from a refurb supplier as businesses are offloading them all the time.

In the same vein, a HP, Lenovo or Dell small form factor tower PC will up your power consumption a little, but give you room for a couple of 3.5" drives as well as an SSD. That's enough to look at putting in a 12TB mirrored RAID for some serious storage. You've also got low profile PCI slots, so you can fit a GPU for faster re-encoding in Jellyfin.

I'm a big fan of the Intel NUC platform, coupled with a fanless case and all-SSD/NVMe drives. They're low-powered, fast enough for most common tasks, and completely silent.

I have an NVMe drive for the OS (currently Proxmox, soon to be Debian again or Fedora), containers and VMs, and an internal 8TB SSD for data storage (whole disk encrypted). This may not meet your needs if you're intending to be a data hoarder, but I have a sizeable movie and lossless music collection accumulated over 25 years and I'm not even using 4TB yet.

You can of course still use a similar setup but keep even larger storage on a NAS device, or simply use a USB dock with a couple of 16TB drives. It's really down to whatever your needs are.

I love that the server, router, modem, and switch use such a small footprint and are able to be powered for up to an hour by an equally small and inexpensive 600VA UPS.

What is "huge storage"? What is your budget?

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

11 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

[Thread #621 for this sub, first seen 22nd Mar 2024, 22:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I’m referring you to my quick “self-hosting guide” for security and whatnot: https://lemmy.world/comment/7126969

With that said,

A) HP Mini second hand. Low power in the "T" CPU models, some have 2 nvme slots that can be used for extra storage with a cheap adapter like this + a power supply for the hard drives. If you don't want to DIY it so much some also have USB type C ports (and Thunderbolt) that you can use to connect to an external drive enclosure or this one.

B) SSD for boot drive, run VMs etc, HDDs for long term storage

C) Debian as base system, no GUI. LXD/LXC as hypervisor to run all your stuff in containers and VMs. Or run everything directly on the machine.

Other recommendations:

• Use BTRFS as filesystem as much as possible;
• Aside from the big brands like HP and Dell there are other alternatives such as the trendy MINISFORUM however their BIOS comes out of the factory with weird bugs and the hardware isn’t as reliable - missing ESD protection on USB in some models and whatnot;

My question would be, why do you need a more powerful server? Are you monitoring your load and seeing it's overloaded often? Are you just looking to be able to hook more drives to it? Do you need to re-encode video on the fly for other devices? Giving some more details would help someone to give a more insightful answer. I personally am using a Raspberry Pi 4, Chromebox w/ an i7, an old HP rack server, and an old desktop PC for my self hosting needs, as this is cheaper than buying all new hardware (though the electricity bill isn't the greatest haha, but oh well). If you are just looking for more storage, using the USB 3.0 slots on the Raspberry Pi 4b you can add a couple extra SSDs using a NVMe to USB 3.0 enclosure. For most purposes the speeds will be fine for most applications.

As for SSD vs HDD, SSD hands down. The only reason you'd pick an HDD is if your trying to get more storage cheaper and don't mind a higher rate of failure. If your data is at all valuable, and it almost always is, redundancy should be added as well.

And as for running Linux, if it can't run Linux I wouldn't want to own it.

Edit: Fixed typo

A) I've seen a lot of people recommending NUC100 computers, but the sata ports may be limited. I currently have my old computer doing the thing (an i5 6500) with Unraid OS, really happy with it BUT they are changing their paying model this week so I don't know I would have went this way. I don't like subscription models.

B) Why not both? I have two SSD of 512Gb for items currently downloading and two HDD for Capacity (each 8Tb) already 30% filled in 1month. Both set of hard drives are set in duplication mode to avoid losing any day.

Have you considered a VPS?

I have one that is pretty basic but works very well for about $4US a month. Mine runs Ubuntu 22.

Regarding your question B:

I personally built a SSD-only homeserver, because of performance, noise and power efficiency. However, if you need much storage, the price difference gets really painful.