I’ve been running a Plex server for music off my gaming laptop for a few months and (I think) I’m ready to take it further - that is, I’d like to have the server running on its own hardware.
At this point, I’d just be running a music server, but I know I’ll want to add more services.
The first would be something like Google Drive - I’m working with a couple of other people on business plans and I’d love to self-host our files and the software (like LibreOffice) to edit them.
I’m comfortable with the software side and I’m finding lots of options, especially in this community.
The hardware side… I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by all the options and I don’t know enough to judge the search results.
Any recommendations for hardware or links to guides would be appreciated.
Check eBay for used business micro/mini/tiny PCs. They’re pretty cheap, and low power consumption. They’re mostly Intel processors, so that’s what you make of it. If I were you I’d look for i3 processors 9th gen and up, i5 and i7 8th Gen and up for transcoding. They can hardware transcode pretty much anything but AV1, vp9, and hevc 12bit but the processors are powerful enough that they can transcode those to x265/264 to a device or two using the CPU without issues.
If you don’t plan on transcoding, I’ve had no issues with a 5th Gen i5 NUC doing server things, but I do offload any processor heavy things to my 7060 micro (8th Gen i7) machine if I want it done quickly.