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
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 a raspberry pi 4 with
- A Uninterrupted Power Supply
- External powered HDD for the data drive
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.
Mine is running on a HP 600 G1 Micro Computer Mini Tower PC. Right now, less than $80 from Bezos. It’s over powered for Nextcloud alone, but I’ve also got other services running on it, including Jellyfin.
It zips along quite nicely, but I’ve also followed the guides for tuning the server for best performance.
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.
@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?
Same here. Works well.
Nextcloud was too high fallutin for me. I share a zfs pool with proxmox’s file server appliance.
Which file server appliance is that?
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 NextCloud is running on an old desktop that’s been repurposed into a server. The server is running Proxmox, and NC is running in docker directly on Proxmox using the nextcloud-aio image.
Found that had better performance than running it in a VM and was less headaches than the other install options.
I keep thinking about moving it to dedicated hardware, say some sort of mini pc, but it hasn’t been a high priority for me.
I do this but in a docker VM. Then I can snapshot and back it up. I haven’t noticed any performance disadvantage since it’s running as a KVM guest, so it’s pretty much the same are running on bare metal.
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.
Nextcloud sucks. Its better to have discreet docker services running for what you actually need vs nextcloud being a monolith of shitty plugins. As for hardware, go on eBay and buy a cheap optiplex tower. It’ll get you started.
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.
For your usecase a pi should be sufficient. You can go with a pi 5 8GB and a docker install, so you can host more stuff later. I would recommend an m.2 head with an SSD instead of an SD card though. Much faster and more reliable.
I have an 8 gig RPi4 (OS is Dietpi) with a 16 terabyte HDD for storage. No issues at all…super fast and reliable. There are great FOSS apps on F-Droid covering just about anything you’d need…the official app, cookbook, bookmarks, notes, news, etc. If you’re using an HDD instead of an SSD, just make sure you have a dedicated power supply for the HDD.
