What I feel is that you need do is to compare the cost of power supply vs hardware then choose whichever is cheaper.

This is really up to you, if you have the budget/space for dedicated hardware then you will benefit from it. However, if you are on a budget/space constraints then you could setup some containers in docker either running on the system or in a VM then transfer them over in the future.

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A mini PCs sips power when they’re mostly idle, at about 10/15w then it creeps upwards if you push it. It also only needs the iGPU anyway even if you wanna do trancoding on Plex. It will most likely be way more efficient that a desktop with a GPU on it

I think the best choice is getting one of those so all your services are working all the time. A RPI will work albeit you gotta be aware of its limitations.

I started with a Pi 4 8GB. It was not able to keep my RAID 1 (constantly loosing one of the two drives, degraded when added back). Transcoding of movies, also Jellyfin, just not possible. So I bit the bullet and took some old hardware (i7-4790K, 1070, 16GB RAM, PSU, CPU-Cooler) and bought some more used (SFF case, mini-itx board, Bluray-Drive). The case wasn’t the cheapest (56€), because I wanted one with enough room for 5.25" drive and 4 3.5" HDDs. Finding a mini itx board for such an old platform was hard and cost 120€ (I didn’t sell the ATX board I originally used with the CPU, yet). But now it’s a great system, running 19 containers atm In other words, don’t underestimate the cost of old hardware. You may find a cheaper, used prebuilt somewhere

I run a home server with an i5-4590 and I haven’t seen it use more than 35W. I’m still looking to upgrade to a newer but lower power CPU (ideally one of those super low wattage chips with similar or better performance like an R7 5700U or i7-1260U).

If power usage is a concern and you don’t need much raw compute, a Pi (or similar SBC) should serve your needs just fine.

If you need a decent middle ground, take a look at mini PCs, they tend to use efficiency-focused laptop chips which are way more powerful than an SBC but sip power compared to a full-fat system.

I wouldn’t buy any older than 7th gen Intel, you can find micro/usff boxes on ebay with an i5-7500T or similar for under $80 usually. One example is the Lenovo M710q Tiny. Power usage on those should sit around 10W idle, and they have solid quicksync support for media transcoding.

Overall just better than a Pi in every way, other than a little more power usage, and lack of GPIO for those kinds of projects.

Nothing will beat single board computer like rpi in power consuption, but PC can be efficient as well. For example in my country I pay around 1€ for each Watt a year (average 0.12€/kwh). So rpi is probably 5€ a year and my new server is like 20-30. There are some servers that run at 10W on idle.

Its 5x difference, but I got much better server and still acceptable cost. Having sata potrs will already save you a lot of $ and time since you need additional hardware to use ssd/hdd on rpi, especially if you need more than 1. And then rpi is not that small anymore. Rpi cant transcode at all, but its good enough for direct play. If you get intel cpu with quicksync you should be golden. I didnt test on 4k, but my g3930 can handle 4x 1080p easy.

I used rpi4 with 4gb ram as media/torrent server for few years and it was simple set and foeget setup untill SSD upgrade when it started started acting up. Figured the rpi cant provide enough juice on USB ports and then I got external power HDD case and got more into self hosting. 4GB soon became a bottleneck so I ended up with new PC and I love it. Still using rpi for 2nd pihole and few more services.