[Question] What should I look for in a mini PC to upgrade

Howdy All! I've been self hosting some services on a pi 4 for a year or two now and have been fiddling with new services lately. I realized I'm pushing 60% or so of RAM and maxing out the SWAP file while fiddling with things. I currently just set up a nightly reboot as a temporary solution but I'm thinking about picking up a mini PC of some sort to replace it with, and wanted to get input from the community (Read: people smarter than me haha.)

I'm happy to hear any preferences anyone would care to share on hardware. I know obviously more RAM is key, as far as I'm aware CPU isn't super important and any recent-ish box will probably have a fine enough processor in it, and of course I'll probably end up getting a bigger external drive to hook up to it but that's not a big deal.

Also, I'm currently running docker/portainer on an OMV core, just how I learned/got into self hosting. Should I take the opportunity to learn Kubernetes or some other big boy system? I've not done alot of reading into it but I know clusters are gaining steam these days even for self hosting, would that be valuable to learn more about as a hobbyist/enthusiast/whatever? I'm fairly competent and used to have some CompTIA certs but as such I know better than to unnecessarily complicate my life lol. It sounds cool but I don't see a use case in my personal usage.

Thank y'all for your time and knowledge!

I'm currently running:
Baikal,
Bookstack,
Bitwarden,
Duplicati,
Filebrowser,
freshrss ,
Linkwarden,
Apache,
Navidrome,
nginx,
portainer,
rpi-monitor,
searxng,
stirlingpdf,
syncthing,
watchtower,

I'm considering:
Nextcloud,
Maybe a game server or two depending on the needs?,
Whatever else seems interesting, I guess :P

thirdBreakfast ,

My step-up from Pi was to ebay HP 800 G1 minis then G2's. They are really well made, there's full repair manuals available, and they are just a pleasure to swap bits in and out. I've heard good things about, and expect similar build quality from the 1 liter Lenovos.

I agree that RAM is a likely constraint rather than processor for self-hosting workloads. Particularly in my case as I'm on Proxmox and run all my docker containers in separate LXCs. I run 32GB in the G2's which was a straightforward upgrade (they take laptop like memory). One some of them I've upgraded the SSDs, or if not, I've added M.2 NVME drives (that the G2's have a slot for).

ZebraGoose ,
@ZebraGoose@sh.itjust.works avatar

I also have an G2 and it haved served me well. Currently I have 100 docker containers (lol need to check this). But still its no match for my G2. Have 64 GB ram, 2TB SSD and 512 GB sm2 drive.

TheButtonJustSpins ,

I like getting Bee-link boxes - they can be upgraded to 64gb RAM, have plenty of CPU, and can have two drives. I run Proxmox on them and make VMs that then run my services in docker.

There's been a lot of talk about N100s as well. I haven't looked into them much, but I assume they should be similar. Looks like their max memory is 16gb. I'd stick with Bee-link.

bionicjoey ,

Seconding Beelink. I have one of their SER boxes as my solution to smart tv and it works great

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