Home Server Noob looking for advice

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Hello,

I'm migrating over from plex and have a pretty basic setup, i5 4690 + 16gbs ram with a large external hard drive -  essentially a noob.

I have a basic Jellyfin just installed on windows 10 home, but that computer was used for some other things as well. I'm looking at a mini pc that has a n300, 256gb ssd, 8gb soldered ram (not expandable), 2x 1GB Eth, 2X HDMI, 4USB 3.x + UsbC and Win11 Home preinstalled. it's the same price as many N100s with 16gb, 512 storage but figured the extra 4 cores would be nice for running multiple things. I don't have much linux experience but i am looking for something with containerized solutions. 

Is this a bad decision to get this with 8gbs of ram? I like the thought of 16gb for "future proof" but at the same time i am a noob and besides transcodes on the igpu i'm not sure i have anything that would load the cpu too harshly.

Also have some audiobooks i wanted to add and was wondering if there is a good plugins as well as a good mobile player.

Looking to run: 

• Jelly
  
• audiobooks.
  
• Caddy reverse proxy or Nginx
  
• (Maybe) pihole/adguard
  
• (Maybe) Pfsense - saw some things saying virtual router is probably not a great idea.
  
• (maybe) occaisional minecraft server  -  yes i know this would be the biggest hog. I can also just use my old pc. 
  
• Monitoring solution of some sort
  
• Any other suggestions
  

Not sure what OS I should use if I should just use Win11 that comes with it and portainer or go with a linux solution. 
Is the 8gb of ram a big sacrifice or should I be fine. 


Thank you!

[TheDreadPirate]

What is your budget? How many users would be using your Jellyfin server? And how much of your current hardware can you reuse? Like power supply and case, etc.

How much system building experience do you have? Or would you prefer something that is mostly turnkey, like the N300 and N100 mini PCs you mentioned (N100 > N300)?

I biased toward plain Linux (like Debian or Ubuntu) and then using plain Docker (no UI) over "NAS" OSes like Proxmox or Open Media Vault.

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Budget i'd like to keep as small as possible but 250 (cost of the N300) is about my limit. If you mean physically building a system, I have done many. Main reason to move to a mini pc is power efficiency otherwise I could reuse the case, psu and drives, it would really be the cpu, mobo, ram.

N300 > N100 (8 E-cores vs 4 E-cores)

Given that this is just a N100 with more cpu, would I be handicapped by the 8Gb ram?

Saw my post got flagged, didn't know some softwares could not be mentioned sorry.

[TheDreadPirate]

8GB of RAM is fine for a headless server. 16GB if you install a UI.

I'm not sure the N300 is worth it, IMO. Since the limiting factor is not the CPU if we're talking about strictly using it for Jellyfin. If you intend to use it for other things, more CPU cores would be better.

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N300 seems like a lower binned N305

I think I'll start adding more vms or containers, i just don't know if I would hit a RAM limit first? Keep in mind where I am the N300 with 8GB/256 is the same price as a N100 with 16GB/500 and only 20$ more than N100 with 8GB/256.


I was hoping the ram was upgradeable on the N300 then it would have been really simple.

[TheDreadPirate]

Oh. Is the RAM soldered on for all of these?

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No, just the N300 unfortunately

[Host-in-the-Shell]

Personally, I'd advise against running both a game server and media server in the same machine. Not that it's wrong or a terrible idea, just that these services tend to wrestle each other for performance and that can strangle a machine under certain circumstances or generate a lot of power consumption.

If you have the required soldering skills and you're married to Windows I'd go for the N300, otherwise I'd stick to the other minipcs or consider learning Linux to maximize hardware efficiency under the N300; since you are open to suggestions for other services to host, that tells me they're probably going to grow in number eventually, and maybe you'll need more than 8GB at some point. I'd aim for the path forward rather than the roadblock: a better CPU is great to have, but only if you are going to put it to the task. Other than the game server, which I already advise against hosting in the same machine, I don't see anything super resource intensive in that workload.

In case you go for the soldered 8GB, then Linux is a great advantage; portainer, on the other hand, I'd forgo entirely. Not only are you wasting resources, but it's a layer of abstraction on top of docker that will serve as a crutch and introduce many pitfalls and portainer specific issues.

[Overlay1]

Personally, I'd advise against running both a game server and media server in the same machine. Not that it's wrong or a terrible idea, just that these services tend to wrestle each other for performance and that can strangle a machine under certain circumstances or generate a lot of power consumption.

If you have the required soldering skills and you're married to Windows I'd go for the N300.

interesting take thanks, yeah i was thinking i just migrate my media server to N300, and then use the old machine for games server as I currently do occasionally with not too much concern. I don't quite get what you mean by having the required soldering skills are you suggesting upgrading the soldered ram? I thought about it but for the cost and effort i don't think it makes sense here.

I picked up the N300 before it went out of stock since the N305 and N300 were seemingly discontinued a few months ago. Figured the extra cpu power from the extra 4 Ecores over the N100 and the extra 8 gpu compute units might just give me another transcode or two if i need it. 

What OS would you suggest? It came with windows 11 home (i guess i should have listed this earlier but the device is the Minisforum Un300 not sure if i can put the link or not) regardless i was going to reinstall the OS not necessarily trusting the vendor os version.

[Host-in-the-Shell]

By having the required soldering skills what I meant was that you have the capacity to either replace or upgrade the ram should it become broken or require an upgrade down the line. Also that you may want to upgrade the ram anyways if you will stick with Windows since 8gb for Windows is not very optimal.

And yeah, not to throw an anvil on you, but one possibility you didn't consider is that it could also be damaged and then you'd be stuck with a machine with broken soldered ram you can't fix if you don't have said skills.

As for recommended OS, that would obviously be Linux; if you are willing to give it a shot, but are new comer to it, Ubuntu seems like your best bet, as it is closely tracked and supported by the Jellyfin team, has more recent hardware support without going through hoops and soon will follow the latest releases of the Linux kernel more rapidly; it's also more user friendly than Debian, which is my preferred choice (for more advanced users).