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.
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.