By server i mean multiple network ports and storage ports, space in the case for several spinny discs in addition to the ssds etc.
I doubt any NUC is good for a server by my definition.
The problem is that a lot of the commercial products are woefully underspecc'ed for the price and you outgrow them quickly. Spinning disks also eat a lot of power, relatively speaking, so they kind of eat into the "low power" usecase.
Rather roll my own Linux thank you.
> Some of them even have decent networking options.
I think few of them have multiple ethernet ports. Plus there's the matter of how much cpu the built in ethernet eats.
Most modern NAS have that option. It just doesn’t make that much sense since that would get rid of the (in some cases really good) DSM.
I agree I'd much rather roll my own system (and that's what I did) and I would personally never buy one of those, but it's simply not right to say there are no options available if you want a low power server off the shelf. Some of them are even decent if you wanna pay for it.
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/topton-nas...
There is a newer board with a J6413/6412 that could also be a candidate if don’t need quite as much processing power.
Reports are that servers with this run under 10W at idle.
It shines especially in scenarios where the Pi is just a tad too slow. E.g. you can't live transcode 4k videos on a Pi, while the N100 has latest UHD graphics and therefore ships with a decent HW-accelerated H265 en/decoder.