Pretty much what the title says, I was wondering, since I want to invest on self hosting applications and my raspberry pi 3 b+ can barely function. I don’t have enormous expectations, just docker containers, nextcloud, pihosted, jellyfin… Any further suggestions (regarding the hardware) will be much appreciated.
Yes, the only thing being that most NUCs can only have one drive (or one m.2 and one 2.5" sata drive) so you can’t do anything like drive mirroring so if you lose a drive you’re in trouble.
I’ve had the drive on my kodi box fail a couple of times now, it’s annoying. Torrenting probably puts a lot of wear on the drive though so it’s to be expected.
I have two old NUCs, one DN2820FYK with an Intel Celeron N2830, and another D54250WYKH with an Intel Haswell i5-4250U. The former can only take one drive but the latter can have an mSATA as well as a 2.5" SATA. I’d like to use the latter with root on the mSATA SSD and a 2TB HDD for media in the 2.5" SATA, but for some reason I get better video playback on the Celeron than the Haswell. Both are supposed to have hardware acceleration for h264 and the Haswell is a more powerful processor so I don’t understand it!
One thing that could help a lot would be have a third drive off one of the USB ports, a cheap large spinning drive, and have a cronjob to routinely copy the contents of your drive to the cheap spinning drive to the backup drive. That way even if you lose your SSD or your SATA drive, you still have a somewhat recent version of all your files elsewhere.
Ideally youwould be storing those files on a NAS anyways.