Table of Contents
Open Table of Contents
Why Upgrade?
Previously, I was using two Raspberry Pi 4Bs and a Pi 5 as the main engines of my homelab. They worked fine for 1080p streaming and even some 4K content. However, I ran into issues with Jellyfin on the Pi 5—hardware acceleration wasn’t fully supported yet.
Besides media streaming, I also wanted to expand my homelab with more services. That’s when I started researching better hardware.
After some digging, I found the N100 mini PC (GMKtec model) and a used 1TB HDD. This combo hit the sweet spot for my budget and performance needs.
N100 + Proxmox
Once I settled on the hardware, I chose to run Proxmox on the N100. I discovered Proxmox through the r/selfhosted community on Reddit.
It’s kind of like a personal cloud server, but it’s actually a local virtualization platform. Proxmox lets me run multiple containers and virtual machines, which is perfect for my growing homelab.
Setup
Pi 4B -> Tailscale VPN
Pi 5 -> Media Storage Server + Pi-hole
N100 -> Proxmox
- 3 LXD Containers (Ubuntu)
- 1TB HDD attached
- Pi 5 SSD (500GB) used as network storage
Setup Details
Pi 4B
- Secure access to the home network from outside using Tailscale
- Monitor homelab status remotely
Pi 5
- Stores recent media content for smoother streaming
- Runs Pi-hole for DNS filtering on the local network
N100
- Main powerhouse of the homelab
- Runs multiple services in LXD containers:
- Container 1: Arr Stack (Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, Sabnzbd)
- Container 2: Jellyfin (media server)
- Container 3: Wizarr (invite system), Jellyseerr (media request), and Jellystat (monitoring Jellyfin server)
Conclusion
The difference with hardware acceleration is like night and day. Now, I can stream 4K content smoothly.
There’s still more for me to learn—especially about media file types, codecs, and sizes. Some say Pi 4B can handle local streaming with hardware acceleration too, but I wanted something more powerful and flexible.
Now, I can expand my homelab without worrying about performance:
- CI/CD pipeline for hobby projects using Tailscale and GitHub Actions (I’ll write a separate blog post on this).
- Self-hosting websites, APIs, and more.
It’s been a fun journey—I’ve learned a lot about VMs, LXD, and Proxmox.
Thanks for reading till the end <3