+- Jellyfin Forum (https://forum.jellyfin.org)
+-- Forum: Off Topic (https://forum.jellyfin.org/f-off-topic)
+--- Forum: Self-hosting & Homelabs (https://forum.jellyfin.org/f-self-hosting-homelabs)
+--- Thread: Looking for Low-Power Hardware (/t-looking-for-low-power-hardware)
Looking for Low-Power Hardware - SudoSaiyan - 2025-05-25
Good day everyone,
I have been running Jellyfin on my gaming machine for the past few months and have gotten fairly familiar with the layout and setup, and want to migrate it to a dedicated box. My biggest concerns for whatever this new machine will be is that it is
1) Power Efficient as possible
2) Able to expand storage efficiently and cheaply
I plan on hosting more things down the line on this machine (Calibre library, Photo backup storage, probably surveillance software), so storage will eventually be at a premium. Electricity isn't cheap in my area so if this is going to be running 24/7 I do want it to be as power efficient as possible, but not at the sacrifice of functionality of streaming / quality, or at the inability to expand storage reliably. As far as streaming is concerned, currently I am building this out to service 2-3 streams concurrently, but realistically it will usually only do 1-2. They do not need to be 4k streams, but the capability of handling it is preferred. One of the consumers doesn't own a 4k TV, and although I do it's not strictly necessary.
Given those constraints and after digging into things, I'm trying to wrap my head around going either a Mac Mini route, or looking into some N100 system instead. With both of these, I think it should be fairly easy to set something up that can stream without issue, but for storage expandability I'm unsure. Is it worth it it to go this route for this use case, and try to find a system that I can cram as much storage into as possible? Or, if instead adding a NAS would be better, are there good power efficient NAS options out there than I can simply run Docker on and configure for my needs that wont sacrifice streaming and forgo a separate box entirely?
RE: Looking for Low-Power Hardware - IndianaLarry - 2025-09-17
If you do not need transcoding, a Raspberry Pi 4B with an externally-powered HDD works wonders. I run quite a bit on my Pi, but I still have little trouble maintaining 1080p streams and music.
With that said, you will likely need external power for the HDD setup. Power passthrough on Raspberry Pis are rather weak, and even adding too many flash drives can cause problems.
RE: Looking for Low-Power Hardware - 34626 - 2025-09-20
For easy storage, find a desktop case that suits your needs.
The motherboard:
Find one with many sata ports
Consider lan port 2.5 Gb/s
pci-e for etc. Intel Arc A310 (low profile but great for transcoding)
Cpu Intel i3 as minimum
OS. I use Debian 13 headless, that reduces power consumption a lot and also ressources.
RE: Looking for Low-Power Hardware - TaikoToaster - 2025-09-20
I am using a Intel N100 embedded ITX motherboard - Asrock N100DC-ITX with 16GB DDR4 RAM - I have 3 HDDs on it (2 onboard SATA, 1 via PCI-E addon card) and it works well.
Power consumption is below 10W idle.
The N100 can transcode sufficiently well for 2 users here.
Sometimes the transcode bugs out but fixes after restarting the Jellyfin playback client side.
I am also running 4-5 docker containers on it without any issues.
RE: Looking for Low-Power Hardware - pxr5 - 2025-09-21
^ I agree with the N100 set up. I've a headless mini PC with N100 and it's great for JF.
RE: Looking for Low-Power Hardware - whirrr - 2025-09-23
I've had my bee-link me mini running for a few months now. It's a 4 inch cube that has 6 m.2 slots,N150 cpu,12 GB of ram,2 2.5gbs ethernet ports and usb,hdmi, wifi,,, , runs truenas and has dockage support for jellyfin (and other apps). They say it uses 18w of power and is virtually silent, $200 (plus drives). Mines running with 6 2TB drives, and after banging my head against the desk for a few weeks got it up and running very nicely. There may or may not be issues with stuffing it full of 4TB drives (I'm trying to get another one running).