I can’t comment on the performance but yeah… 6500t is what, 8 years old at this point? N100 is a year old. Tech can improve a lot in that time.

Get a mini pc. If you can find a cheap intel NUC on ebay for example. Way more power in a compact form that doesn’t draw that much more power than a rpi… much less four of them.

Yeah a lot of people will say to just use your old PC thats lying around and it is a great way to start and learn but if you want something with a lower footprint (low power, quiet, cool) you’re better off buying something more suited to that task. Laptops or mini PCs are much more suited to that.

Id love to have a server rack one day but I just cant justify it drawing so much power when I can live with the drawbacks of a smaller server.

11th gen NUC. Much faster than a RPI4, more power if needed (for things like Zigbee USB adapters, external drives…) while still maintaining low power draw on idle. It will jump to 20-30W when transcoding but I dont mind higher power draws when im actually using the thing.

Sell. I don’t run a data center and I’m not a cloud provider. I have a meager home server with some stuff plugged in and serve some tv shows. I want this to be as low foot print as possible. If it goes over 10w idle, I’m shutting it down lol.

Im really impressed with the thing. Cpu idles at 30C as well. Very similar to rpi4 with 5 times the performance.

Look into a NUC on ebay. I was able to snag a new 11th Gen i3 for 200 eur. Power draw is about 7w with a headless Debian. Running a media server, nextcloud, pihole, an arr stack and I’m planning to add home assistant and a zigbee bridge which I now run on a pi.

If you aren’t planning to run to much on it a rpi4or5 will actually be enough and these things can draw 15 on absolute max load.

Android? No. It’s not made for it. You are using a hammer to paint a wall.

Phones? With a different Linux based distro? I can see it happening. For a small niche at least.

I run nextcloud which has a music plugin. The plugin exposes an ampache and subsonic api. All you need now is a client. I use ultrasonic on android. This is for out of home streaming. In home both plex and jellyfin offer dlna for pretty much any networked device made in the past 15 years. That’s how I listen on an AVR. On a PC I could use that or just browse to the nextcloud music plugin and listen in browser.

Used an rpi4 for a year as a media server and was quite happy but wanted to run a few more things so I switched to an i3 NUC11 and I really like it. Running an arr stack + plex + jellyfin + nextcloud and its using 7w ‘idle’ (mentioned services running) with a headless debian 12. Fit a 5TB HDD in it and a 1TB nvme. 16GB or ram. It definitely runs faster and jellyfin is actually usable. Still though, rpi4 can handle the load (sans jellyfin). The rpi5 will also fit into this market very well.

It’s hard to recommend a Google product but Google TV or chromecast with Google TV does the job it’s supposed to do. App support is large and what isn’t there can be installed the same way it can be on an Android phone. I can stream Playstation games to it even though Sony doesn’t support it. Smart TV built in os’s aren’t up to par yet. At least not in the price range I’m buying my tvs.

Same mistake but I can live with it. The mini form factor is just too cute and uses so little power. Unusable for a data hoarder but passable for me.

I used two pies. Rpi3 for home assistant, pihole and zigbee+mqtt. rpi4 for arr stack and nextcloud with a 5TB disk on it. Swiched to everything in a i3 NUC 11 i got for 200eur. Works better, uses less power if you can believe it.

A note about transcoding: I dont know your setup but I never needed it. All video I have is encoded in h264 or HEVC and all my video player devices support these codecs natively. The last time I needed to transcode was 10 years ago when all I had for a media player was a Wii and a movie in HEVC.

Manually plug in a few disks every once in a while and copy the important stuff. Disks are offline for the most part.