Would you recommend to use a RPi 5 or a second hand Lenovo mini pc (i3 6100t, 8gb ram) or something else?
Mini PC. Beelinks with the N100 chip are absolute beasts at doing video encoding at low power.
I also recommend Beelink. I’ve been running an eqr6 (ryzen) for almost a year and it’s been awesome.
I bought a generic N150 based minipc for a firewall & router (running OPNsense), and repurposed an old desktop PC as a server to host immich, paperless, nextcloud, etc… I considered both RPi and mini pc for the server, but I needed a few TB of storage and wanted redundancy. Spinny disks were a much more affordable option than SSDs, and minipcs and Rpis tend to not have much space for those drives. You can add on storage to them, but then they just become clunkier and more expensive than the old PC I already had laying around. Power consumption is probably a few watts higher on the PC than a Pi would be, but it’s not terrible.
That’s why I went the direction I did. I’m 3 about or 4 months in, and it’s been solid so far.
I just repurposed one of our older PCs for that task. Slap Ubuntu on it, install webmin, and you’re set up.
depends on what you want it to do.
Is it going to be a general purpose file server? A media server through jellyfin, etc.? If a media server, do you need to transcode?
NAS, perhaps apps like vaultwarden, nextcloud, immich, maybe grafana for sensors… I am not 100% sure as this would be the first.
I’ve have amazing luck with both Beelink and Minisforum computers. They’re relatively cheap and excellent quality.
I personally use the Beelink ME Mini and it’s been able to handle just fine about any server tasks I need it to, not to mention the wildly expandable storage.
Beelink ME Mini
Would something like this be suitable as a NAS + Jellyfin + Home Assistant box?
That is exactly what I use mine for and it does it pretty much silently.
