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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Is Mac Mini suitable for self-hosted server? (lemy.lol)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

47 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The price seems pretty good. I don't really know much about mini PCs. Do you think there is a better alternative?

Update: ok, not price efficient. Noted 👍

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[–] stuner 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I don't have a Mac Mini, but for always-on systems, the idle power consumption can become quite significant.

Gaming PCs can consume up to 100W (876 kWh / year).
My AMD B650 NAS consumes about 17W in idle (150 kWh / year).
A NUC / Mac Mini can idle as low as 5W (44 kWh / year).

If you pay 0.30$/kWh, running your old 100W gaming PC all the time would cost you 263$ per year. My NAS is 45$ per year...

It also depends on what you need/want from the machine. The Mac Mini doesn't have any HDDs and can't run a regular Linux distro, for example.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Would the Mac Mini actually idle at that wattage if it's open for connections? I doubt it, it's probably more like 10W, which is generally the range for those smaller AMD MiniPCs or NUCs.

If it's 10W, that's a $20 savings from your NAS w/ a desktop CPU (and probably a discrete GPU, unless it's running an APU). I can get 4% easily on savings, so I'd only need a $500 savings vs the Mac Mini to recoup that difference every year ($500 * 4% = $20). So if you already have an old PC, use that instead of buying a Mac Mini, and you also won't have to fight macOS to do what you want.

[–] stuner 4 points 3 days ago

I do think it can achieve that while waiting for network packets (see e.g. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested).

But in terms of money savings it would rarely make sense, as you need to make it back during the time you run the system. If we assume 6 years lifetime then it would only make sense to pay $120 more. But yes, I'd also go for a system that runs regular Linux :)