Anyone using a NUC as a mini home server? How is it? or if you use something else as mini server what? and why?
I keep thinking of getting something which I can run multiple vms as needed for things like game servers, hosting docker containers, etc. load it up with a bunch of memory. I don't want anything too big/power hungry given most of the time it would likely sit idle.
I use mine as an ultra low-cost self-hosting machine. I have the cheapest dual-core NUC 11 (bnuc11atkc2) with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD (figured that would be enough) running Debian in a poorly ventilated IKEA cabinet. It runs Pi-hole, Home Assistant for my smart stuff (Zigbee stick via USB), Livebook (live coding notebooks) and Nextcloud, everything in Docker, and has two 4TB USB HDDs on BTRFS exposed via SMB as a cheap NAS with daily Restic backups to Backblaze.
The machine sits at 49-53 °C and I have the fan curve set so the fan only starts spinning when it gets a little over that. Which I believe doesn't happen at all, because it's so underpowered.
I don't know exactly how much power it consumes, but the whole IKEA cabinet sits at 16 W for my router, one Raspberry and this NUC together, so probably not much.
I have the latest Gen 13 I5. It was an impulse buy as was on offer at a good price.
I installed a 1TB Solodigm P44 NVME drive, 32GB memory.
OS wise I installed Proxmox. Install was a pain but that’s because I wanted LUKS encryption. I had to install Debian first, setup LUKS, then setup Dropbear ssh so I can ssh in to it at boot for the password. Once that was out the way I followed Proxmox’s instructions on migrating Debian to Proxmox which is a case of adding the Proxmox apt repos and installing. A vanilla Proxmox install is minutes, but then it’s unencrypted data which is a pain when selling drives.
I have a small vm with WireGuard + rarr suite of apps, then a bunch of lxc containers, jellyfin etc. It’s mostly idling away and silent but the fan kicks in pretty quickly if doing anything moderate cpu wise. The fan is loud when it starts.
I am happy with the purchase as it uses little power and it’s mostly silent for me. If it wasn’t an impulse buy based on the price a better option might of been the Aliexpress fanless N300 boxes at the low cpu end, or a one litre mini pc such as a eBay used HP Elite Mini G9 as they have better cooling so quieter.
I have ~ 10 NUCs in various roles, also some Gigabyte Brix. Some are servers, some are single-use developer machines (eg. I have separate ones for RHEL 7, 8 and 9), one is a desktop, one is a router.
Having owned so many over years, I've found they are fairly prone to problems and have some missing features. My main gripes are:
- Unreliable RAM. Obviously being Intel, ECC is not supported, and I have had several with bad RAM or random apparently RAM-related hanging issues. You could argue that this is nothing to do with Intel since the RAM is always from a third party (but a top quality one), but why do I only ever have this problem with NUCs and not the dozens of other machines I own?
- CMOS batteries die after a few years and are not replaceable. Or they are replaceable if you completely dismantle the machine and desolder the battery leads, wrap a new CR2032 battery in tape with leads and solder it back to the board, but who has time for that. The battery should be socketed.
- Only one 1Gbps network port.
- Confusing model numbers and huge variety. ASUS should reduce and simplify the range.
- No remote access / BMC. This would be the one feature that would make the systems 100x more useful.
- Expensive! (Luckily Red Hat paid for most of them.) The Gigabyte machines are much cheaper.
The good thing about them is they are small, quiet and use little power.
For running VMs, note that the max possible RAM is 64GB. I do run VMs on some of mine, so it is possible.
> - No remote access / BMC. This would be the one feature that would make the systems 100x more useful.
Ironically this is one of the options provided by some models in the dizzying line up. While it's not a dedicated IPMI port it uses Intel vPro for BMC like functionality. You'll pay a pretty premium for those models though.
I tried to buy one, but once I worked out what the exact model number was that had VPro I couldn't find one in stock anywhere. It should really be a standard feature, but I guess Intel didn't want to cannibalize server sales?
The power consumption of an idle "Wall Street Canyon" 12th-generation model is almost negligible. At the SoC, often less than half a watt. At the wall, less than 5 watts typical, most of which is being wasted in the AC/DC conversion.
I use a wall street canyon NUC to run proxmox (hypervisor), portainer (docker management), pteradactyl (game server hosting panel), pihole (moving off the big point of failure soon :) ), and a handful of random things here or there.
It's been great so far, fans aren't too loud, power consumption isn't killer and there's ton of headroom still, assuming no modded minecraft server taking my ram.
I have an i3-8109U NUC, probably purchased in 2019. I've had to replace the fan a year or two ago (found an unofficial replacement on ebay), but otherwise I haven't had any trouble with it (running Debian).
It replaced a Raspberry Pi 3, and is obviously way more performant compared to that.
For me it's been great. When I finally found RAM and an SSD that was supported(!!), the experience got rock steady. On a headless Ubuntu server I'm hosting Home Assistant, Plex (the hardware transcoding and tone mapping is fantastic on a 12th gen Intel CPU), have tested out some "arrs" and I can tell there's plenty of headroom for more applications. The only thing is the fan noise when it really gets going. But I gather the 13th gen NUCs are much quieter. Considering a chassis swap in future.
But the tradeoff for a small NUC is a big power brick.
Scored my model for €450, barely used. i7 8665, 32 GB RAM and 500GB SSD. It would have been around double that price new. This was about 4 years ago.
It’s quiet, rock solid and can run just about anything I throw at it. It’s even overkill for my uses, but if I get another 5 years out of it it’s incredible value for the money.
I have a NUC running Debian for 8 years as a fileserver for my home, with 2 x 2T USB HD. It was slow (USB2) but fine for the intended use of mostly cold storage.
I recently replaced it with a Synology Diskstation, looking for a new job for the still running NUC.
I keep thinking of getting something which I can run multiple vms as needed for things like game servers, hosting docker containers, etc. load it up with a bunch of memory. I don't want anything too big/power hungry given most of the time it would likely sit idle.