So I’ve been googling to find out what to buy for a jellyfin/game server and the problem is almost all posts are about buying hardware in the US or EU. I checked the second hand market and it SUCKS around here, like 10 year old+ CPUs being sold as ‘intel i7’ for stupid prices.

I’ve decided to buy new stuff, at least I get warranty. When I searched around for info on that I also got a lot of useless (for me) advice like buying mini pcs that are either not available around here or very expensive. Basically I think I just need to build something myself using non server hardware, is that a bad idea?

What I have in mind right now, please tell me if there is anything that will cause issues later:

  • i5-12400 (mainly for the integrated graphics to use jellyfin’s hardware transcoding. Is the UHD 730 enough for that?)

  • No idea what to get for MB, I usually buy AMD. H610 boards seem cheap enough but very limited on storage options (sometimes only a single pcie slot even), I do want to eventually add lots of storage to it.

  • Server quality storage is extremely expensive, not sure if its worth buying. Was think about getting some WD blue 2tb drives, but really not sure here either.

  • For case I saw some suggestion for cases with a ton of hotswappable drive bays but sadly I couldnt find any to buy in my country, will probably get whatever cheap one I can find.

  • PSU I want to get any gold PSU with low wattage from a reputable brand but its been hard to find 500W or lower here, usually shops only offer brand PSUs that are 650W+.

  • 16gb of any decent ram I suppose?

Btw I live in Brazil, if you feel like searching around even tho the websites are in portuguese:
www.kabum.com.br
www.pichau.com.br
www.terabyteshop.com.br

Any help is appreciated, its gonna be my first server so I have no idea what I’m doing

  • alphabethunter@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Hi fellow Brazilian!

    Yeah, second-hand here sucks. You can get x-99 mb + cpu combos on alliexpress for 400 reais though, old xeons are good for server/jellyfin, just not very efficient. For Jellyfin, my biggest money sink is in HDDs. 4tb drives are 700 reais each, and there’s no second-hand refurbished stuff in the market, so you have to buy brand-new. For a GPU I have an ancient 750ti, but I’m looking to buy an intel A310 card if they drop lower than 800 reais. At the very least you’re looking at 3000 reais in pc parts for a server though. Mb + cpu + ram is somewhat cheap if you buy from china through alliexpress, but GPUs are a no go there. Keep in mind that when buying from China you have to avoid products above 60 dollars (around 350 reais) because of the super high taxes. If you want to buy domestically, I’d recommend a b450 AM4 board + a 3200g or something around that. You can avoid buying a dedicated GPU with a 3200g or similar, and get a nice modern platform, but the cpu will be quite weak for game servers, with inadequate support for pcie lanes, memory channels and sata ports though.

    Also, for a game server, it’s very likely that you’ll have to work around being behind CGNat. I currently only self host Jellyfin inside my own house because of that, it’s just a huge pain in the ass to deal with it. There are solutions though, I just haven’t bothered. I’m still in the process of buying hard drives, so right now it’s not a huge priority.

    Edit 1: wording Edit 2: forgot to talk about psus… Just don’t buy anything chinese. The MSI Mag 650w is the king of cost x benefit here in Brazil, nothing comes close, it’s usually around 300 and rock solid.

    • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 days ago

      Even products bellow 50 USD are getting the 50% tax now, and xeons dont have igpu, I prefer to buy an intel with igpu to do hardware encoding/decoding, more efficient and I heard it gets the job done really well (jellyfin says to absolutely not buy AMD APUs for hardware decoding btw). For hosting I actually have pots 80 and 443 open on my router so Ive been using caddy and duckdns with no issues.

      Which hard drives have you bought btw?

      • alphabethunter@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Below 50usd the taxes are considerably lower, and just above 50 usd they get a 20 dollars rebate on taxes, so it’s okayish to buy.

        I bought a seagate 4tb drive, cheapest 4tb at the time, on Amazon if I’m not mistaken.

        Oh, you’re lucky then. NET/Claro locks down all their modens for consumers, and I know that most other ISPs around here do the same.

        • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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          4 days ago

          Nah, that was a few years ago, its 50% on every thing now, literally looking at the price on aliexpress as I write this, R$29 earphone with R$14 tax

          • alphabethunter@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            You do know that above 50 USD taxes are 92% right? Check it out, a product for 1000 reais will have 900 reais in taxes. It’s bonkers. But technically, it has always been like this, but it wasn’t truly enforced/audited. Now that they are collecting the taxes at the point of sale, you pretty much pay for two products to buy one.

  • ragingHungryPanda@lemmy.zip
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    6 days ago

    You may be overestimating your requirements a bit. For video, all you need is something with a transcoder and it could handle at least one stream. If this is just for you, it’ll be idle most of the time. As long as the hard drives have good reviews, it’ll be fine.

    What you listed sounds good. I have my entire family’s files and photos (with some duplicates that i never removed) and it comes out to less than 1TB.

    I think your idea sounds fine. An old PC will do fine.

    • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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      6 days ago

      Thanks, I might go with what I listed tho I still ahve no clue about intel motherboards

  • monkeyman512@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    To make sure there is not a misunderstanding, the wattage of a PSU is not how much power it will draw. The wattage is how much is can supply. So if you have a 1000w PSU, but all your components draw 200w of power it will use about 200w of power.

    Additionally, if you plan to get a lot of HDDs in the future, do some research on power rails. Some PSUs are designed to only be able to supply a small amount of power to things like HDDs because most people only have 1 or 2.

    • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 days ago

      Its my first server but not my first pc, so I know I can use a 700W PSU with no issue except most of them have the highest efficiency at around 50% so less potent PSU would be ideal in the long run, if not only to save money on electricity bills but also for the enviroment

      • Max@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        I believe for the highest efficiency you only want to use about half of the rated power of the PSU. So if your system draws 350W, 700 is a very reasonable power supply

          • Max@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            Sorry I completely misread your comment to be saying that the maximum efficiency was 50% not that it occurred at 50%.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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    7 days ago

    I think Brazil has very high tariffs so that is probably what is driving up prices.

    10 year old hardware may not be that bad. It depends on what it is and how much electricity costs.

    • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 days ago

      No need to think, I mention in another comment that we have 50% tariff on all imported stuff. And I’m not buying 10 year old stuff for that price lol

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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        7 days ago

        Any libraries, businesses or other places looking to get rid of hardware?

        I would start on the cheaper end as you will waste money with mistakes

        • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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          7 days ago

          I live in a developing country, when libraries/business and other places get rid of hardware its because its literally useless, Im talking single core 32bit cpus useless. I made this thread so I hopefully wont make any mistakes hahaha

  • Luffy@lemmy.ml
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    6 days ago

    mainly for the integrated graphics to use jellyfin’s hardware transcoding. Is the UHD 730 enough for that?)

    My 4th gen Intel i5 can do that

    No idea what to get for MB

    You get the cheapest thing available with your socket that has at least 4 sata slots for migration

    Server quality storage is extremely expensive, not sure if its worth buying.

    Just get 2 WD blues

    For case I saw some suggestion for cases with a ton of hotswappable drive bays

    Or, you know, if you are making a whole post crying about your financial situation, maybe you can just move your ass and manually swap the HDDs.

    PSU I want to get any gold PSU with low wattage from a reputable brand

    If you want something energy efficient, why in gods name do you want to buy a desktop CPU?

    16gb of any decent ram I suppose?

    If you want to be fancy I guess, but my 25€ half dead optiplex that dosent even pass its own self test is currently running on 8 gigs of DDR 3 storage from different brands I got out of dumpsterdiving in a junkyard right before they threataned to call the police on me, and I live in goddamn Germany, so maybe make up your mind if you want to be crying about being poor or actively going out of your way to buy fancy Server Equipment I can only dream about in my setup.

  • ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    Here in Panama a lot of people buy things online in the US and use freight forwarders, I don’t know how they do it but I never pay taxes on that stuff

  • dabe@lemmy.zip
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    6 days ago

    I agree with everyone saying you can run what you want on most any hardware. Only thing I’ll throw in is that with older/more used parts, you’re at a slightly higher risk of hardware failure, so if you wanna store data on there that you really don’t wanna lose, consider looking into online backup storage services. I’m not sure of their international availability but some good ones:

    • borgbase
    • backblaze

    if it’s not a lot of files that you actually want backed up you might be able to get away with free/cheap tiers of google drive/one drive using rclone

    Good luck!

  • RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz
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    6 days ago

    Make sure you can afford the elctricity later. 250W constant draw doubled the bill I had before installing my rack. Do the math with kWh per month.

    • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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      6 days ago

      Luckily electricity isnt TOO expensive here but I will keep that in mind thanks

  • coconut@programming.dev
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    7 days ago

    Just want to point out you don’t need beefy hardware if you’ll use jellyfin only in your network or if you won’t stream very heavy media over the internet. If your library is mostly 1080p, you’ll be able to stream that without transcoding for the most part.

    • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 days ago

      Will stream over the internet and being in a developing country a lot of devices can’t even handle h265 so los of transcoding. Will also host foundryVTT and maybe some game servers

  • Drunk & Root@sh.itjust.works
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    7 days ago

    u can prob get by with using old devices an connecting to storage like old laptops may be enough depending what your needs are

  • Mordikan@kbin.earth
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    7 days ago

    Depending on how much storage you are needing for media, one possible option there (if nothing else until you can find a more cost effective solution) is to host the media remotely. You can use rclone to sync remotely to a local mount point and then point your Jellyfin library to that mount. pCloud is a popular choice for stuff like that.

  • twinnie@feddit.uk
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    7 days ago

    I spent a few years living in a developing country in Africa so I have some appreciation of what you’re going through. I used to find lots of technology shops on Google Maps, etc, then when I got there they just sold phone covers and SIM cards and knock-off iPhones.

    I can’t really offer much advice but have you considered just making something based on a second hand laptop? A lot of them are still pretty powerful just with old batteries and they’re designed to run efficiently.

    • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 days ago

      a laptop would extremely limiting as far as storage goes, I prefer not having to add a NAS later. Thanks for the info tho

  • verstra@programming.dev
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    7 days ago

    Hmmm, I repurposed an old PC of mine, only buying large WD red HDDs. If I were to expand, I’d ask friends/family if anyone has an old box to sell. And maybe buy a server rack. Second option would be “used goods websites” and only after that I would be looking to buy new.

    That’s because jellyfin+immich+planka+a few static websites really don’t need that much compute power. The heaviest work to be done is playing a movie, which could be done by a laptop. Unless you are planning for many users to use the server at the same time.

    I live in slovenia

    • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 days ago

      Eh, sadly not an option otherwise I wouldve gone for it right away, most of my family would never buy desktop pc hardware for anything

  • oopsallnaps@piefed.ca
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    7 days ago

    This is all off the top of my head, as I’m not at my server atm…

    I believe the 12400 should be good for hardware transcoding. I have a dell optiplex (i5 9th gen, can’t remember exacts) running a low traffic server (my wife and I), with no issues running at least 2 4k streams concurrently. It comes down to what you encode your videos to.

    Additionally I’d grab at least one new NAS drive, as they tend to be rated for long term use. If options aren’t great there, then maybe a few drives in a raid configuration may also work. If you do get a NAS drive make sure its fairly quiet, my server is located in a common room, and the hdd fan is fairly audible. oops.

    • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 days ago

      What would be some options for NAS drives? The ones I found were quite expensive to the point I think it would be cheaper to just replace damaged drives and run them in RAID. Was also thinking about using a M.2 drive to run programs on and HDDs for file storage, I wonder how beneficial and how hard it is to do that

      • oopsallnaps@piefed.ca
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        7 days ago

        Western Digital Reds or Seagate Ironwolf iirc. Yeah they’re expensive because they’re rated for a different use case than traditional drives. I’m no expert though! I believe I’ve got a WD Red.

        I believe thats what I do though, I have a ssd in there as well for the base os. And I just have the nas drive mounted. Jellyfin docker container setup to point to the nas drive as the media storage folder, as well as a samba share setup so I can throw stuff like bandcamp purchases easily.

        • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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          7 days ago

          Man, 7200 version of those drives are all over 400 USD here, my poor bank account

          • oopsallnaps@piefed.ca
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            7 days ago

            oof. Yeah I think I have the 5400 rpm one. Maybe start with the regular hdd in raid and see how that fairs long term. Just make sure to backup your media in more than one place!

            • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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              6 days ago

              Thanks for being the only one here that is actually commenting on hardware choices, everyone else is trying to convince me to try stuff I already tried haha

              I might just splurge and get one of those drives afterall, hopefully they go on sale at some point

              • oopsallnaps@piefed.ca
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                6 days ago

                lol! Well its always a good idea to see if what you currently have works well enough. Then splurge on the fun…i mean expensive things. But that doesn’t always work, so I hope the new parts serve you well!

                One last thing to note, Jellyfin doesn’t have the best authentication coverage. iirc its possible to leak some metadata about videos, music, etc… I’d recommend either not keeping the server public facing (i.e. use a vpn to connect to it remotely) or don’t store anything personally identifying on it.

                I just tunnel my traffic through tailscale, while annoying at times has been reliable. But I’m not sure thats available in Brazil.

                • Dagnet@lemmy.worldOP
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                  6 days ago

                  Been using duckdns with a caddy reverse proxy, no idea what I will do with the server tho