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]”
There are good lists of alternatives out there. For Germany, I like this one: https://lmaa.space/
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.
Ask your local university facilities department about their overstock policy. The university of Arizona literally has a warehouse where you can peruse their old computers and furniture and buy at Craigslist prices.
Yeah I just posted the same thing. I work for a university and we send useful stuff to surplus all the time. I can verify several universities in my area do in fact have warehouses with stuff like this in them.
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!
University surplus. I work for a university and we get rid of stuff all tfe time that is still very useful.
one year my local uni got rid of a whole lab of G5’s. this was just about two years after they bought them.
Yeah I’ve found 2 year old Dell laptops that still had Accidental Damage Service still on them. Why the heck someone surplussed that is beyond me.
I got my home server (Lenovo thinkcentre, i7 6700) for $30 minus ram or storage at my local university surplus store a few years ago, and I have no regrets. Added a 256gb sata SSD, 16 gb RAM, 8tb HDD all refurbished for like +$150 when that was still cheap.
Do they sell/auction them? If so, where? I’ve seen some things on municibid, but most of it is like “900 iPads, must buy all of them!” or “here’s a pallet of printers!”
Well my university just sells them. It’s all in person so there is a lottery to determine place in line because it’s popular. And for us it’s piece meal, not 900 iPads all at once. Might have to do some research to figure out where but I’d suspect most universities do this sorta stuff.
For example I’m in NC so there is this: https://www.doa.nc.gov/divisions/state-surplus-property/retail-store-locations
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.
Ask a local ISP like us. We store our old servers and send them to be recycled annually. If I had an enthusiast walk up to our offices asking for a donation, we wouldn’t hesitate. Can’t speak for competitors, but it’s worth a shot.
I would gladly pay shipping for a server donation… 🥺
@uenticx @qwestjest78 Wish I lived near you 😊
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.
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.
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.
So I trick for the double drives is to pop in a low profile usb drive and install the os on that. Then you can use the ssd/hdd for other things.
So you leave the usb plugged in for boot and then you are good after that?
Yup! If you installed the os on it.
So you have one usb with the iso flashed to it and a second to install the os on. Use the first to install to the second.
Make sure the OS is good for that, or you use a very high endurance USB drive, or you use two drives in a mirror and are prepared to replace them. Most USB drives are not designed for constant use, like the log writes your OS will be doing.
You can mount /var and /tmp to the ssd, lot of tutorials on doing this for Pis SD cards if your googling.
I usually pick up the cheapest non-chromebook laptop I can find and put Linux on it.
There are a couple key advantages here:
- It’s very cheap.
- Battery Backup included.
- Monitor and keyboard included.
- Power efficient by design.
- Available all the time from any vendor.
- You can take it with you, update your server on the couch and slap it back on the rack.
- Virtually any configuration you want in candy colors.
- Did I mention these are very cheap?
It can be a bit tricky to find one with Ethernet and two SSDs is kinda exotic (especially because you could get two whole laptops for the cost of some NAS enclosures) but there are over 3000 different models under $300 on Amazon, I’m sure you can find something good.
The battery backup is a more of a liability than a benefit imo, will just turn into a spicy pillow eventually. Especially considering any power loss will hit your router/network too rendering the server’s battery moot. The only thing a laptop battery really protects against is accidental temporary unplugging.
Not sure, the battery doesn’t really get cycled, it doesn’t get hot, I have a few which are going strong after 10+ years (the useful life of the hardware).
It’s not a hypothetical for me.
Batteries are more problematic sitting at full charge than when they are empty. You’re also paying money for features you don’t use (battery, screen, keyboard) and have less ability to upgrade, repair, or add storage.
By all means if you have an old spare laptop lying around use it as a server, I usually take the battery out though.
Ok bro, you’re wrong and laptops haven’t come with removable batteries since before OP was born (probably).
Of course, I also took the lead acid batteries out of my ancient laptops before I e-wasted them and went down to the sock-hop and dinosaur ride.
Ok “bro” damn you’re right and you sure showed my unc self! What an idiot I am!
Pick any laptop model you like and search for “how to remove battery” or look up the model on ifixit. Show me a single one where the battery cannot be removed. I’ll wait.
You’re arguing that something I’ve been doing for over a decade can’t be done.
Why? Look at my perspective. On one hand, I have 10+years of lived experience doing this thing, on the other hand there’s internet guy who says it can’t be done?
Just compare a mini-pc to a entry level laptop with the same specifications from any manufacturer.
An Asus NUC with no disk or ram and an Intel 250 (celeron) uses 65W of power and starts around $300. It has 2 cores at 1.8ghz and costs go up from there.
From the same manufacturer at the same time, I can find over 300 laptop SKUs at the below $300 price point to choose from including the entry level zenbook 14, which, in addition to being complete (having ram is nice) packs a significantly more powerful processor and only uses 45W.
I never said it couldn’t be done, hell, I’ve done it myself. Try being a human and asking me what my actual argument or suggested approach is, try re-reading what I actually said rather than assuming it is X just so you can dunk on it.
Max TDP is completely irrelevant, that is about cooling capacity which completely sucks in a laptop, hence the chip limit. The relevant factor for a server is idle power draw at the wall outlet.
For my servers I get second hand dell / hp / mini pcs for peanuts. Sips power, still work fine, still going strong, upgradeable storage etc. Second hand laptops of the same era are now useless ewaste.
I don’t prefer this approach either, but if you do, a lot of commercial models (e.g. thinkpads) can be set to keep the battery at a given percent Max. Set it to only charge to 80% instead of full, and safely shutdown at like 30% and the battery will be far more stable long term. Also set ntfy alarms to your phone on the thermal sensors so you know right away if a fan gets clogged.
Would a pi5 work?
It would, but it does not have SATA. You can find much cheaper computers that do have it
He said “sub $300” \s
They’re quite versatile computers for general purposes, but their i/o performance is dreadful. Mine all max out at about ten megabytes per second. That will not do, for server purposes.
Fortunately, there’s businesses all over that are chucking out all their old mini PCs since they won’t run Win11. I got an extremely decent one for £20 and it’s my new home server. Absolutely storms it, while just sipping at electricity.
I served 4k content with plex off a 4, while running pihole on it.
They say they have a drive enclosure, so if that’s network attached they may be good.
You actually can use a minipc. Minisforum has their NAB series and those have a slot in their internals for an SSD and they have an NVME slot in the motherboard. I found a NAB9 with an NVME, SSD, and 16GB of ram for around $310. So I would look for used NAB6s (cheaper than NAB9) on EBay. You should find some for under 300 with the Data SSD and NVME.
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:
My last build and current have been a Thinkstation and a z series workstation, both used from ex-gov auctions, were decently priced, will run everything you wanna throw at them.
They do come at the cost of increased power draw, but since I’ve put in solar I’m not worried about that.
Set aside some for surge protection/UPS
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.
