Best cheap hardware to run Nextcloud on?

Hi!
i used Odroid HC1 for home cloud and its working fine since 3 years.

Hi @sanfe ,

does it support Only Office and Document Server Community?

You’ll need a 64-bit device with at least 4gb of ram to support an office suite alongside Nextcloud. Do not expect fast performance, even for just one user. It will be bare minimum.

At this moment, onlyoffice is not working in ARM64 yet…

For home/small business use:

I prefer to get a used/refurbished business PC (Lenovo Think Centre or similar from other brands) from eBay or directly from a refurbish company, put in a new SSD for the system and a new HDD (e.g. Seagate Ironwolf 4 TB) for the data.

This strategy can be adapted well to the budget. For 200-300eur you get pretty good used PCs, for less you get older models, but anything gives plenty of power for Nextcloud (much more than a Pi or so).

I think used business PCs give the best power and reliability for the money. They are also much more energy efficient than used/old servers or workstations.
Of course Arm devices are even more energy efficient, but they lack the computing power.

Handling big amounts of data is no fun on Arm. E.g. storing pictures and viewing them in the browser: Generating hundreds of thumbnails will be painfully slow if the machine is not fast enough.
Also compressed/encrypted backups (restic!) will be very slow if the machine is not fast enough and 100+ GB of data needs to be processed.

Hello,

For my personal use, I find any old low powered CPU based laptop (for example Intel Pentium Quad Core or ultra low powered i3 chips) to be best suited. Saves a lot in long run for electricity bills & comes with its own built in massive battery for healthy long hours of backup in case of any electrical outage. Using snap and it’s backup features should mitigate the issue of no RAID. Lastly, it’s cost effective & helps you to recycle an old hardware.

However, if the user count is high, these low powered CPUs really struggle. For these type of use case, one should try to find better CPU, like for example i5 or higher.

But when it comes to business use case, where data is valuable, active RAID protection is must. There, selecting a desktop based system makes sense to use RAID setup. I personally prefer consumer grade mass market hardware as finding spares in long run becomes really easy & cheap.

Thanks

Hey all, we’ve started a new wiki topic for putting together hardware suggestions.

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Hi All,

I wanted to let you know that there is a new Odroid available.
Since I had and still still making very good experiences with the older model (see my older post)
I am suggesting the new model to all who are looking for cheap good hardware:

@anon75456558 please add it to the list in your established wiki. It does meet the requirements if configured accordingly.

Feel free to edit the wiki as you see fit. Worth noting the H3 and H3+ require you buy memory in addition.

wwe: close old topics