this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 enough? (feddit.it)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'm quite a newbie to the self-hosted world, and I was wondering if a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 could be enough to start something and have "reasonable" performance.

I'm interested in exploring a self-hosted torrenting machine with a jellyfin server, a pi-hole instance and something like nextcloud for cloud drive and foto backup.

Is it worth trying, or it's better I just wait to get my hands on better hardware to begin with?

Edit: thank you for answering me, you confirmed my expectations!

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Started with one RPi 3, ended up with 5 in a case that needed ventilation and a switch. It looks cute, but... The only one working to my pleasing is PiHole. Nextcloud is slow as hell (you are bound to external HDDs over USB and that sucks). 3 use normal HDMI ports, 2 mini HDMI. When shit hits the fan and SSH doesn't work for some reason, I have to plug in a monitor and keyboard.

Oh, and one SD card went poof due to not noticing it had no free space left and still writing logs on it for 2 weeks. SD cards are unreliable in general.

I regret not using VMs on a more beefy mini PC that I could have upgraded to my pleasing, benefit from SATA, and would have been easier to maintain.

So I would recommand RPis if you actually need and use the IO ports. Otherwise, you will soon learn they get overburdened. For general self hosting, myself would have gone the ProxMox route (which has a free tier and that's what I have experience with).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Pretty much the same here. Got a bunch of RPis in different states of disrepair from auctions and amassed about 6 of them in total. I used more and more of them for automation and it worked well for a while until some software required more processing power than one Pi could manage and it all slowly fell apart.

Sometimes they'd just randomly crash and shut down, some of the SD cards died, sometimes they'd just plain lock up and fail to respond despite appearing to be on, so I eventually just started using an old desktop with a first gen i7 in it to do everything. I slapped Linux on it and it runs a few VMs for OS level software like HAOS or stuff I need behind a VM and the rest just runs directly on the machine.

I've not checked but I don't think it's drawing that much more power than all the Pi's did, and now I have a bunch of them spare for simpler tasks like dashboards or other projects. I have one Pi4 that runs very basic things like PiHole and that's it. It used to run my camera system but even that was pushing it.

They're great for what they are, but if your home automation setup grows they can't really scale with it. Things like Jellyfin will require good hardware for decoding if it's required. Even my dedicated server struggles with 4k content but it can just about keep up and more modern hardware should be better. I had Plex running on a 3b+ and that could definitely not decode much.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

All true. And RPIs aren't even cheap anymore. It's much more cost effective to buy a refurbished lease PC and get the extra processing power, expandability & reliable storage. I run everything on a HP elitedesk and it didn't cost much over £150.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I don't think it has enough ram for even 1 of those applications (except pihole), not to mention it'll be hard setting up an external drive on it.

best get some kind of 2nd hand thin client, it'll be much much better.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

For PiHole it will be OK, but for Nextcloud or Jellyfin is too slow. It is better to buy used MiniPC/Terminal - it will be more powerful

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

No as that hardware would be way under powered for almost any of those tasks on their own, let alone for all of that on one machine. Your best bet would be to look at the hardware recommendations for each service you are interested in and go from there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Started with one RPi 3, ended up with 5 in a case that needed ventilation and a switch. It looks cute, but... The only one working to my pleasing is PiHole. Nextcloud is slow as hell (you are bound to external HDDs over USB and that sucks).

Oh, and one SD card went poof due to not moticing it had no free space left and still writing logs on it for 2 weeks. SD cards are unreliable in general.

I regret not using VMs on a more beefy mini PC that I could have upgraded to my pleasing, benefit from SATA, and would have been easier to maintain.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Pi hole will be absolutely fine. Nextcloud is unusuably slow on my Raspi 3b so it's definitely not going to work on a zero. Jellyfin is definitely a no also unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

From a pure performance standpoint a pi zero is good enough to start and learn the basics. Nextcloud and pihole should be working just fine. Regarding Jellyfin depends on what your usecase is.

In any case, I would suggest to start and see for yourself. The you can as you go.

E: To boil it down: Pihole - enough, Nextcloud - very simple file handling, jellyfin - streaming music yes, videos not much

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Next cloud is unusuably slow on my Raspi 3b, there's no way it'd work on a zero

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