I have a refurbished Lenovo Thinkcentre that I was running Truenas off of. Everything was working great, but it got hit with a power surge and after lots of trouble shooting it appears the motherboard is fried and I don’t trust my ability to soder and fix it.
No now I need to upgrade my setup. Wondering what is a good sub $300 computer I can order that will run Jellyfin, Immich, and a few light services off of? With Truenas you seem to need two SSDs. One to boot and one to run apps, so it seems like a mini PC will not work.
I have a seperate HDD drive bay with a few hdd’s in it full of shows and picture. Just need a PC to run my services.
I would prefer something I can order off Amazon or can be shipped quickly so I can get back up and running again.
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Stop ordering from Amazon
“… order from here instead [insert alternative]”
I just went to ebay and goodwill for my tech stuff. Goodwill is a tad annoying though cause their online shop is literally only bids, so have fun watching the price shot up in the last few days.
ebay is slightly better, but in the end just another publicly traded company that treats their employees like shit.
Slightly better is still the direction we want to head in. Not sure how else we get off the racketing-effect/boiled-frog path we’ve been on.
Yes it is, I would just like to encourage the frog to jump out rather than reduce the flame.
It’s good to encourage reuse, which is eBay’s main thing. I wouldn’t have a reason to buy anything new from them however.
It’s their main marketing thing.
But they have just become another reselling platform for dropshippers, selling the same plastic garbage you find for cents on AliExpress. Tolerated because selling it simulates growth. Their main competitor, as communicated internally, is Amazon. Those who pushed for cleaning up the site to focus on re-use were sacked.
Doesn’t mean you can still find good stuff there, but local classifieds are still the better choice.
If you go with eBay, still look local for someone who is selling surplus stuff. There’s a lot of hassle and cost for the seller over ebay, but they are not allowed to arrange anything via a back channel - however, once you have bought one thing and you are happy with them, you have their contact info! You can ask for more or reach out in the future directly when they look to have lots of stock of something you like. They will probably be happy to avoid eBay and get some easy sales.
There are good lists of alternatives out there. For Germany, I like this one: https://lmaa.space/
I use a nucbox mini pc and two usb ext hdds to run a jellyfin server and a samba file server. Works great. Im using Lubuntu – i dont exactly recommend it, but it works fine enough. Any lite Linux distro would probably work great. Here’s a picture of my janky “server rack” setup:
A big fan of the HP elite desk line. Specifically the mini form factor. Also the Intel version for quick sync.
iGPU for low power draw, but can still handle a transcode or two for Jellyfin.
Cheap as a refurbish on eBay.
My server is currently sitting at 1.5 years of uptime, hosting Jellyfin, minecraft, adguard, and a while suitr of other tools!
If you want a lot of cores, there are xeon kits on aliexpress and other websites, xeon e5-2650 v4 or v3 has a lot of cores and consume very few energy, mainly the v4 (comparing to other server cpus), it has a lot of pci express lanes, etc.
Consume very few energy
Don’t go with ancient hardware if you are wanting energy efficiency
mainly the v4 (comparing to other server cpus)
It consumes less energy than the other server cpus from intel that are generally available.
Except the hardware itself is really old which means that the performance will be much lower and thus the CPU usage will be higher. The older systems also have much slower memory and bus speeds.
You would be much better buying a more modern consumer CPU since the performance boost will mean that the CPU utilization will be lower. Most workloads including Jellyfin do not benefit from tons of slow CPU cores. Things will work better the higher CPU and ram frequently you have.
Server CPUs are a poor choice outside of very specific applications
My E5-2667 v4 (8 cores, higher frequency) using almost nothing of energy while watching some asmr on freetube and responding:
Edit: it has a higher tdp than the 2650 v4, and has 16gb of ddr4 ram
11W is actually a lot lower than what I was expecting. It isn’t crazy efficient but it isn’t bad.
Are you sure it supports DDR4? The Intel spec page says it has a clock of around 2.5GHz with DDR3 memory
From dmidecode, DDR4:
Edit: Broadwell supports both DDR3 and DDR4, with some caveats
Handle 0x0073, DMI type 17, 40 bytes Memory Device Array Handle: 0x0070 Error Information Handle: Not Provided Total Width: 72 bits Data Width: 72 bits Size: 8 GiB Form Factor: DIMM Set: None Locator: DIMM_B1 Bank Locator: NODE 1 Type: DDR4 Type Detail: Synchronous Speed: 2667 MT/s Manufacturer: Undefined Serial Number: A64010B5 Asset Tag: DIMM_B1_AssetTag Part Number: Rank: 1 Configured Memory Speed: 2400 MT/s Minimum Voltage: 1.14 V Maximum Voltage: 1.26 V Configured Voltage: 1.2 V Handle 0x0076, DMI type 17, 40 bytes Memory Device Array Handle: 0x0070 Error Information Handle: Not Provided Total Width: 72 bits Data Width: 72 bits Size: 8 GiB Form Factor: DIMM Set: None Locator: DIMM_D1 Bank Locator: NODE 1 Type: DDR4 Type Detail: Synchronous Speed: 2667 MT/s Manufacturer: Undefined Serial Number: A6401009 Asset Tag: DIMM_D1_AssetTag Part Number: Rank: 1 Configured Memory Speed: 2400 MT/s Minimum Voltage: 1.14 V Maximum Voltage: 1.26 V Configured Voltage: 1.2 V
The CPU may not use too much power, but the chipset and all the supporting circuitry will. Supporting 4/8channel memory aint free. And RAM can use a ton of power too.
Find something on craigslist or local pickup on ebay, check government/police surplus, or do some freecycling. At least in my area a lot of people leave their e-waste computers at Best Buy, often in the doorway, nobody cares if you come and pick them up. Even if they’re broken (and they’re often perfectly functional and sometimes surprisingly powerful) it likely only takes a few before you’ve got some functional combination of parts.
It’s likely not as much of a picker’s heaven anymore since I imagine the huge wave of windows-10-obsolete computers being thrown away for no reason has probably mostly subsided, but there is so much old and perfectly functional stuff out there it’s really unjustifiable to be buying something new especially at today’s modern prices.
I purchase a bunch of machines off government auction, patch then up, and pass them back out for very little. Anything with 4 cores and 8 GB memory should do it. If you can get something with DDR4, that’s a big step. Bonus points of it was made after 2018.
A mini PC could certainly work! If you’re willing to go ebay, I’d recommend any of these Lenovo Thinkcentre SFF PCs:
1-2x m.2 slots, 1x 2.5" slot, and some can accommodate a half-height PCI-E card in place of the 2.5" slot. Presumably, you’d want to go Intel for QSV
Yissss I got a bunch of tinys for 50USD each. I5/16GB DDR4/256GB NVMe. They run home theater computers and Linux servers AMAZINGLY. I would have bought more if they had more available.
Wow, that’s a great deal. I currently have two: one w/ a dual 1-gbe NIC for opnsense and another for proxmox
I thought so, too! Forgive my ignorance as I’m just getting into Linux and selfhosting—what do you use opnsense and promox on separate machines for?
Currently one of my machines is running Fedora as a home media computer, playing stuff in the living room 24/7 for the cats. The other one I’ve got Win10LTSCIoT and CatchyOS dual booted on, mostly using that for general computer stuff in Linux and running a modded game server in Windows.
I have one dedicated for opnsense, which runs my firewall/router. I used to use a Ubiquiti ER-Lite, but its compute power was a little lacking for certain features I wanted running. One of the niceties of running pfsense/opnsense on a “real” computer is that it just runs faster and boots faster after a software update, haha. I also have tailscale on it so that I can remotely access my home network.
Opnsense can technically be run as a VM on proxmox, but it’s generally not advised to do so. The proxmox machine is running unifi network for my ubiquiti wireless AP, adguard home, home assistant OS in a VM, and frigate in a VM, but I’ve been thinking of consolidating the various container services and VMs into just all containers running on a uCore OS installation instead of proxmox.
It won’t be on Amazon, but I found a ton of older generation Mac minis available on Craigslist in my area. I picked one up for $50 and installed Ubuntu server. Thing’s been running like a champ for 2 years.
Edit: should have fully read your post. No idea about installing truenas on it. I’d assume most would be single ssd machines.
+1 on Mac mini as well. I just checked OfferUp in my area and M1-M5 are insanely expensive ($500+, M1 coming out about 6 years ago) but really good machines especially for their size and decent on power consumption too.
But downside of a M series is either you run macOS or Asahi Linux and nothing else yet.
So go for the Intel Mac Minis which are much cheaper and can run nearly any Linux distro with little to no issues as you would on a Windows PC. I’m seeing $50 range in my area as well. Older are good because RAM can be upgraded on some of them, but not all. Would be wise to do research on whichever seems right.
A word of warning on Linux on Mac though. Oftentimes there can be weird quirks with power management and suspend/hibernate. For a server though I guess that point is moot.
But downside of a M series is either you run macOS or Asahi Linux and nothing else yet.
I’m OOTL; what is it about Apple Silicon Macs that apparently make them such trouble to support? If one distro can manage it, what’s stopping that code from being upstreamed to the mainline kernel etc.?
Any used PC or laptop that can run Linux.
Just about any of the Intel N series minipcs are often suggested for just Jellyfin. I haven’t looked at them too much yet.
I just use whatever trash and old computer parts I have lying around.
You you could do most of that with a raspberry pi5, 8GB. With a whole kit, you can get it for under $250. I’m running 3 at my place: 1 for media (servarr stack, JF, Navidrome, Invidious), 1 for the Fediverse (Mastodon, Piefed, Peertube, WordPress), and 1 for anything else.
Edit: I also missed the part about truenas, but you can still run containers on any other OS just fine.
Why tho?
For $250 you can build a pretty solid system with lots of storage
I have a NAS for storage. The pi sips power, doesn’t make any sound, and runs what I need.
The newer raspberry pis have gone up in price so much that the limited port selection is off putting to me now. You could pick up an older thinkcentre and do so much more.
Hit up local government auctions. Sometimes they sell 2-4 computers in a lot, sometimes they sell 157. I got 4 Lenovo mini computers for $34 each in an auction a while back. They only needed hard drives.
Where you happy with the Lenovo thinkcentre? You can often find replacement motherboards for these. It will be cheaper than any of the alternatives here.
Woot.com has lots of refurbs around that price.
It’s part of Amazon so you can use your Prime shipping.
