What hardware do you use for Nextcloud?
I’m willing to finally get my own cloud using #Nextcloud but I have zero clue about which hardware I should choose for home storage. It would be used for domestic stuff, such as photos, music, movies and files, for the whole family, not necessarily for work
I just bought a used Intel N100 mini pc with 16gb RAM and 2tb SSD for a little more than I would have paid for a Raspberry Pi 5 setup. It doesn’t draw much more power than a RPi, and I’m not limited to what’s available for ARM if I want to expand the install at some point.
@fdrc_ff @selfhosted
We have a Raspberry Pi 4, and its performance is totally sufficient for photo uploads, file sync, contacts, calendar, cookbook, notes, … Don’t use just the SD card, though, but an SSD.Did you do the nextcloudpi install?
Cant answer for them, but if you use dietpi they have use the debian package set up with scripts to pull dependencies like a webserver and database automatically. It was very painless in my experience.
I used a RaspberryPi 4B for about 3 years. I connected storage over USB-3 to a pair of SATA SSDs. It handled everything pretty much flawlessly for two users and half a dozen devices. We even had multiple users on Plex. dietpi was brilliant for my first home server :).
Initial uploads may be slow depending on your storage layout but in my experience the requirements are super low.
You need this for your family, and not hundreds of people? No crazy, outlandish usage requirements?
Then basically any PC will do.
My Nextcloud journey went from a Raspberry Pi 2B with a single USB HDD over a Pi 3B to a QNAP 2bay NAS on RAID 1 with a proper backup strategy including daily encrypted cloud backup. Having come to rely on the setup much more than when I was starting out playing with it years ago, I sleep much easier now. That said, I never lost any data, even on very questionable hardware without any redundancy whatsoever.
I’ve got a small Enterprise customer running on a Dell r710, 2gb ram to the slightly custom docker image for nc, 4gb+ for the woods sit, the other 14gb to KVM to run a windows application.
In my case, I have Nextcloud on an Ubuntu server, on an old laptop from 2008. With an Atom processor 1GHz, 1 GB of RAM and 500 GB of HDD.
I have a raspberry pi 4 with
- A Uninterrupted Power Supply
- External powered HDD for the data drive
Nextcloud was too high fallutin for me. I share a zfs pool with proxmox’s file server appliance.
Which file server appliance is that?
My NAS, which is my old PC. Ryzen 1700 w/16 GB of RAM, which is way overkill (just need like 2 cores and 4GB RAM or so).
Hardware isn’t particularly important, NC isn’t all that heavy. If you’re using Collabora or OnlyOffice or something, you may need to care a bit. Use what you have, and upgrade when you run into issues.
That said, I’m considering switching to Seafile because it can apparently do Collabora now. I don’t use any of the NC features, I just want a Google Docs replacement.
I have used it on old underpowered computers happily for years. There’s just no need for anything with high specs.
before you take the jump, consider a way lighter and easier alternative - syncthing (files) and radicale (calendar, contacts). dependable, bullet-proof, super-lightweight, zero issues - everything nextcloud isn’t.
I was the happiest when I finally booted nextcloud off my network, never to return.
I do regularly have issues with radicale, for years now. One is that it does not work properly after boot. I have to SSH in, kill the radicale process, and restart it.
docker?
No docker. Plain executable.
i5 9th gen. 8 Seagate Ironwolf in a RaidZ2. 64GB ECC Ram. Software: TrueNAS.
I’m currently using an i5 9500 and it runs good here too.
Note for OP though: If you don’t need/want transcoding it’d be way cheaper to get an equivalent AMD CPU just because motherboards are hilariously expensive for an obsolete platform.
Really, anything works. I use a decade old desktop that in it’s prime was used for MS Office and emails, so if that thing runs smoothly, I think anything will.
My home server is a refurbished HP t630 thin client with 8 gb of ram and a 1tb SSD. I’m running various services, Nextcloud-AIO being one of them. I bought it for € 35 plus the SSD and a 4 gb ram extension. I definitely do recommend used hardware as it is usually cheaper, more powerful and more environmentally friendly than buying something new. Wouldn’t trust a used SSD though.
