I’ve been eyeing these devices for some time now. The price point is… delicious!
I saw some opensource-ish project one day that mentioned that they are building an OS around Plex and other media servers and using these N5105s and selling the package for USD500ish (I think).
So I went hunting for the hardware and found it on Aliexpress for that cheap (sub USD200).
Does anyone have experience running these? How hard is it to get Ubuntu running on them? I dislike that they ship with Windows 11. Would be a few bucks cheaper if they shipped with Ubuntu or no OS, right?
Also, what about running docker on them? Can they support your usual homelab stuff? Portainer, Pi-hole, *arr softwares, a dashboard, etc.
I use an N5105 for my Opnsense firewall and run Adguard Home on it as well. Installing software on it was incredibly easy. Mine was barebones, had no OS, and it has an American Megatrends BIOS so it was as easy as selecting boot from USB.
I have no doubt it could run a small homelab. I have my Unraid running on a worse quad core gen 4 i5 processor (20+ docker images, 1 VM).
The only downside I would point out is that some of these things are passively cooled and put out some HEAT. It looks like yours has a fan so that’s nice. Maybe another would be Plex transcoding… depending on how many people you have on your Plex you maybe could run into some transcoding issues.
I only have myself and a family member. It’s mostly local use, but I do tend to use on multiple platforms - tv, phone, tablet. So my current setup does get around to transcoding a lot. Thanks for telling me about your gen4 i5 running a bunch of docker containers :)