Would you recommend to use a RPi 5 or a second hand Lenovo mini pc (i3 6100t, 8gb ram) or something else?
Mini PC. Beelinks with the N100 chip are absolute beasts at doing video encoding at low power.
I also recommend Beelink. I’ve been running an eqr6 (ryzen) for almost a year and it’s been awesome.
The Mini PC would be a lot easier. The RPi needs things to be built for ARM, and not everything is. The RPi is also slower and isn’t repairable.
RPis are great for many things, but generic home servers aren’t one of them, unless you really need clustering for some reason (like, a Ceph cluster).
I would avoid a Raspi/ARM at all costs. But there is a third alternative: A x86 SBC like a Zima Board or blade might be exactly what you are looking for. Small, powerful enough and far easier than an ARM to maintain.
I bought a generic N150 based minipc for a firewall & router (running OPNsense), and repurposed an old desktop PC as a server to host immich, paperless, nextcloud, etc… I considered both RPi and mini pc for the server, but I needed a few TB of storage and wanted redundancy. Spinny disks were a much more affordable option than SSDs, and minipcs and Rpis tend to not have much space for those drives. You can add on storage to them, but then they just become clunkier and more expensive than the old PC I already had laying around. Power consumption is probably a few watts higher on the PC than a Pi would be, but it’s not terrible.
That’s why I went the direction I did. I’m 3 about or 4 months in, and it’s been solid so far.
I use a retired business laptop. 16GB RAM and Linux, mapped some shares from my NAS. Low power high performance.
Is it going to be a general purpose file server? A media server through jellyfin, etc.? If a media server, do you need to transcode?
NAS, perhaps apps like vaultwarden, nextcloud, immich, maybe grafana for sensors… I am not 100% sure as this would be the first.
I’ve have amazing luck with both Beelink and Minisforum computers. They’re relatively cheap and excellent quality.
I personally use the Beelink ME Mini and it’s been able to handle just fine about any server tasks I need it to, not to mention the wildly expandable storage.
Beelink ME Mini
Would something like this be suitable as a NAS + Jellyfin + Home Assistant box?
That is exactly what I use mine for and it does it pretty much silently.
I just repurposed one of our older PCs for that task. Slap Ubuntu on it, install webmin, and you’re set up.
If you want something more capable that will handle more experimentation, go for the mini PC. If you know exactly what you want to host and you want to prioritize low power consumption, the pi might be a better choice.
usually works well enough, but some aren’t built great and can have stability issues. i usually have the thing running for a few months with light tasks to ensure it’s stable before putting it into critical use.
external usb-sata enclosures cause a lot of issues, so i test those as well.
depends on what you want it to do.
Raspberry Pi 5 exists?
Oh neat! https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/
For two years, yes.
If power consumption isn’t a huge deal, then an Intel-based Mini PC. This will allow you to do transcoding for streaming as well as any other more CPU-intensive task. It also gives you stellar USB 5Gb support which can be used for quite a large storage pool. I’m running a 5x 16TB ZFS pool on an Intel-based Lenovo mini PC. It’s in a multi-bay USB box. Unfortunately AMD’s pre-Zen 5 USB controllers aren’t reliable for this use case which is why I recommend Intel. Pre-Zen 5 AMD-based mini PCs might be OK with one disk per USB port, but as soon as you peg a USB port to its limit, you start running into USB resets.
