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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.
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Same here. Works well.
Did you do the nextcloudpi install?
Cant answer for them, but if you use dietpi they have use the debian package set up with scripts to pull dependencies like a webserver and database automatically. It was very painless in my experience.
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.
I used a RaspberryPi 4B for about 3 years. I connected storage over USB-3 to a pair of SATA SSDs. It handled everything pretty much flawlessly for two users and half a dozen devices. We even had multiple users on Plex. dietpi was brilliant for my first home server :).
Initial uploads may be slow depending on your storage layout but in my experience the requirements are super low.
before you take the jump, consider a way lighter and easier alternative - syncthing (files) and radicale (calendar, contacts). dependable, bullet-proof, super-lightweight, zero issues - everything nextcloud isn't.
I was the happiest when I finally booted nextcloud off my network, never to return.
I do regularly have issues with radicale, for years now. One is that it does not work properly after boot. I have to SSH in, kill the radicale process, and restart it.
docker?
No docker. Plain executable.
zero problems with docker, maybe try that.
You need this for your family, and not hundreds of people? No crazy, outlandish usage requirements?
Then basically any PC will do.
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.
When I was first playing with NC I was using a RPi3 with an external SSD for a drive. Performance was pretty good, but as soon as I tried the same setup in a VM, the performance tanked. The only way I found to avoid the performance penalty was a manual install like it was bare metal, which I didn't really want to do. My experience with such setups is that they tend to be brittle.
My understanding was that the performance penalty was caused by the chain of VMs. Proxmox --> Ubuntu VM --> Docker. I don't know enough about it to say for sure.
Yah, I don't think a Pi3 is the place to make many determinations on the efficacy of VMs vs bare metal.
I have a raspberry pi 4 with
- A Uninterrupted Power Supply
- External powered HDD for the data drive
I've got a small Enterprise customer running on a Dell r710, 2gb ram to the slightly custom docker image for nc, 4gb+ for the woods sit, the other 14gb to KVM to run a windows application.
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.
I have a T630 as well. It's currently running 26 Docker containers without issue. I love it.
I use a relatively low spec KVM VPS on another continent. Remember, kids, if all your backups are in one location, you don't have backups. You have copies.
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.
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.
I run the AIO master container, on a NUC (4-core i5, 32G). Family use; never any load issues.
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.
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.
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.
Nextcloud was too high fallutin for me. I share a zfs pool with proxmox's file server appliance.
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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 used it on old underpowered computers happily for years. There's just no need for anything with high specs.
Mine is a small N100-based machine with 2 SATA SSDs in it. 16 GB RAM and it also runs many other services.
The better the hardware and connection, the faster the interface will be.
i5 9th gen. 8 Seagate Ironwolf in a RaidZ2. 64GB ECC Ram. Software: TrueNAS.
I'm currently using an i5 9500 and it runs good here too.
Note for OP though: If you don't need/want transcoding it'd be way cheaper to get an equivalent AMD CPU just because motherboards are hilariously expensive for an obsolete platform.
I use a an Inteln Arc card for transcoding. Mainly because I also use Immich and transcode movies too. It's great.
I most of my parts from Ebay second hand, including the CPU.
Oh nice, didnt know you could HW accel immich. I havent tried immich yet but im getting v tempted!
Going the dGPU is a good idea though, I gotta get in on that eventually.
They use the hardware acceleration not only for transcoding and encoding but also for the AI models afaik. It's great!
I am using it on an Intel J5005 with SATA SSDs, managed through Docker. Works flawlessly.
If I were to upgrade, I would choose a board with a modern PCIe 4.0 M.2 Slot, because i'd like to put the database on fast NVME storage.
Pi5 8GB with SSD. Only 1 user but often sharing folders with others including Memories photo sharing add on. Syncs between several machines & mobile. Also syncs Joplin notes. Pi5 also hosts variety of other (lightweight) stuff with no issues at all (Portainer, Nginx Proxy Manager, Linkwarden etc).
Previously hosted on Pi4B (4GB) with external hard drive. I've found the Pi5 + SSD faster & more robust so for me it's been a worthwhile upgrade
I have nextcloudAIO running on a VM with 6 vcpu, 16gb ram. No issues with performance.
The root partition is on an nvme drive, the data partition is on a HDD raid 1 array.
That VM is hosting another few services like nginx proxy manager, Heimdall, and a few other things I forget at the moment.
Never have any issues with performance
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'm running Nextcloud as a VM on Proxmox, Proxmox running on a NUC6i5SYH, with 32GB and 1TB SSD. The Nextcloud VM had 8GB of RAM assigned, which is more than enough, I think I could get away with 4. There's only two users though, so it doesn't see a lot of Intensive usage.
It's been working like a charm for me for years already.
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