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.
The sub-$300 is increasingly dying because of the RAM prices, but anything with a N100 or N150 should be enough for your usage case.
Wondering what is a good sub $300 computer I can order that will run Jellyfin, Immich, and a few light services off of?
A lot more options than you think. The Tiny/Mini/Micro PCs are fantastic for what they are, even one running a 7th gen Intel CPU is more than plenty.
Dell optiplex
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!
I always used my retired PCs and parts but then my kids all wanted gaming rigs so spare PCs and parts do not exist in my world anymore and they tended to be too big, noisy and inefficient.
I would go for used ex-corporate desktop mini PCs from the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo. Perhaps don’t go for the smallest ones if you want to be able to get into them and add stuff. They tend to have reasonably good idle power and noise and its common to find ones supporting two nvme ssds. Intel cpu with quicksync for jellyfin video decode if you aren’t adding discrete gpu - check supported codecs. Codec support varies across generations I think.
I would stay well away from laptops: bad thermals, power limits, limited expandability and SBCs like RPi which have poor io for servers.
I picked up an old HP Elitedesk off ebay a few years ago. I added a few TB of SSD and another stick of DDR4 when that stuff was cheap. It supports two nvme ssds as well as space for sata drives. Apart from media storage I can’t see any compelling reason to want to upgrade it.
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.
You can go far below $300 with very little practical performance compromise, but I wouldn’t even look on Amazon with memory prices being what they are lately. Get an old DDR3 era Optiplex desktop on eBay, throw a $25 Quadro P400 in it for transcoding, and transfer your existing SSDs over. Tons of eBay listings have 2-4 day shipping. With DDR3 you can easily get 16GB of RAM for like $30 if it doesn’t have enough already. Avoiding DDR4/DDR5 will save a ton of money so it’s essential to buy used.
The SSDs and hard drives for the array are by far the most expensive part. I’ve been using an underclocked and undervolted Ryzen 1700 in my server for 6 years now and have zero complaints around CPU performance. I did eventually need more than 16GB of RAM last year, but the only outright failures I’ve had are on the various component’s fans.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
My 2014 Mac mini has two internal hard drives because that era supported Fusion drives. Mine wasn’t specced with a Fusion, but for about £10 I picked up an adapter from eBay so I could populate the NVME slot. As a result I’ve got a 1tb 2.5" SSD that houses /home, and a 250gb NVME drive that the rest of the OS lives on. But they could be set up in any way that suits.
The only real caveat with that Mac is to ensure the one you get has 16gb RAM, because it ain’t upgradable (unless you’re dosdude1). Also, it’s GPU isn’t much cop. But mine is running Debian and a bunch of services on 8gb and doesn’t cause me any issues.
+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.?
Mainly that it’s a custom ARM processor, not your standard x86 architecture like the Intel processors were that were also available in non-Apple hardware.
macOS runs extremely well on it and I think there’s not much demand for a custom Linux distro because of that. Plus the fact that your favorite distro would have yet another architecture they would have to support by adding this in. Asahi is an exception because the team spent time doing it but I haven’t heard of any others getting Linux distros created for it yet. As time goes on and the prices decrease, we’ll start to see more teams dedicating time to creating Linux distros that support it.
Just about any of the Intel N series minipcs are often suggested for just Jellyfin. I haven’t looked at them too much yet.
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 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.
Thinkcentre Tiny, Dell Optiplex Micro, or HP ProDesk Mini. Prices have gone up the last few months but they’re still a solid value. Most sellers ship pretty quick these days.
Thats my setup. Second hand lenovo m900 tiny for 100€, nvme ssd 2tb for 200€. Running immich, navidrome, dawarich, opencloud without problems
