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.
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.
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.
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
University surplus. I work for a university and we get rid of stuff all tfe time that is still very useful.
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
Thanks. I didn’t think to hit up individual unis. Then again, do I really need another server?
… Yes, I do.
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.
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.
@uenticx @qwestjest78 Wish I lived near you 😊
I would gladly pay shipping for a server donation… 🥺
A refurbished Dell optiplex has been my move. Hasn’t failed me yet.
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.
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.
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.
There are good lists of alternatives out there. For Germany, I like this one: https://lmaa.space/
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.
I use Intel NUCs off eBay for this kind of stuff. A few years ago you could get one for ~$200 on eBay.
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
There are companies selling off PCs that are “too small” for Win11, really cheap. More than sufficient for a NAS. You might even get a bunch of them, chose the best mainboard/case/PSU set, put the others in storage, and get all the RAM and HDD in one box.
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.
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.
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.
Any used PC or laptop that can run Linux.
