Find the best deals for mini PCs on eBay and Amazon. With many of them entering the used market, this tool helps you find a cheap mini PC based on your needs. Prices are updated a few times per hour.

Thought this might be helpful as a lot of these mini PCs are hitting the used market.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    65·
    2 months ago

    Nice, but I wish there was a “Reputable Brand” or “Warranty” filter.

    A lot of these boxes are made by the same OEM, and branded a thousand different ways under various names specifically for price fixing on large marketplace portals online - different colors, different cases, but same features without a warranty.

    A lot of these fake brand names come out of companies who simply change names once they hit a certain number of bad reviews on marketplaces. Same shitty hardware, different brand name. Beelink and Minisforum are legit, but ‘KingHive Pro’ is probably made by ‘MiniKing’, and also sells things under “GamerKing”, for example.

    • fpslem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      2 months ago

      Beelink and Minisforum are legit

      I wish I knew a lot of this when I first started shopping for a mini PC. I ended up with a Beelink model that I’m quite happy with, but it seems almost luck that I didn’t pick another one, and I would have liked a “reputable brand” search function.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        18·
        2 months ago

        Next time, check out Level1Techs on YouTube. Wendell reviews a lot of these devices, and he’ll give pretty good feedback on what’s legit and what’s not. Ho has reviewed MinisForum for years and has consistently recommended them. Just be careful, because he also reviews the more sketchy devices and sometimes recommends them (but with caveats), so don’t assume that because it is covered, that it’s legit.

        • fpslem@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          Thanks for the rec! I also love that you presume that there will be a next time, cuz, uh, that’s accurate. These little boxes are powerhouses, I probably want one for a TV set-top box now that all the TV boxes (Roku, Amazon Fire, even Android TV and soon Apple TV) are riddled with ads.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            4·
            2 months ago

            Yeah, I might end up getting one for that. My current TV doesn’t have ads, but does have enough smart features to have a Jellyfin app, so I’m good for now. But my SO wants a bigger TV, so that may end up being sooner than later.

      • Omgboom@lemmy.zipEnglish
        7·
        2 months ago

        Beelink are solid in my opinion, but I was in the same boat, I picked one at random that had the specs I wanted.

    • mahin@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      61·
      2 months ago

      I was mainly looking for used ones like Optiplex, Thinkcenter etc when I made this. Hence those brand filters. Thought they were a much better deal than a beelink, so I guess the site is optimized for that. Oh also can you send the link for the KingHive Pro listing? Might be able to filter out brands like that.

  • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.netEnglish
    7·
    2 months ago

    Looking great! I think it would be amazing if there are filters for processor generations as well as form factor. Thanks for sharing this tool!

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    61·
    2 months ago

    Does anyone happen to know if there is a N100 model that supports HDMI-CEC so I can make my old TV set smart with a recent Kodi and maybe some retro-games? But I’d rather not let it consume 9W or whatever such a machine needs all day long. So it’d need to start and shut down on its own. Preferably without manual additional steps involved, hence the CEC…

  • corroded@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    2 months ago

    I have a few services running on Proxmox that I’d like to switch over to bare metal. Pfsense for one. No need for an entire 1U server, but running on a dedicated machine would be great.

    Every mini PC I find is always lacking in some regard. ECC memory is non-negotiable, as is an SFP+ port or the ability to add a low-profile PCIe NIC, and I’m done buying off-brand Chinese crop on Amazon.

    If someone with a good reputation makes a reasonably-priced mini PC with ECC memory and at least some way to accept a 10Gb DAC, I’ll probably buy two.

    • Concave1142@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      I’ve been running OPNsense as a VM in Proxmox for a year on an AliExpress box that doesn’t have ECC. If I might ask, why do you have a requirement for ECC?

      Before this box, I ran a Dell R230 with pfSense but got tired of the noise and 40 watt power draw.

      I’ve had zero issues without ECC, so I’m just curious about your need for it.

      • corroded@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        There are really two reasons ECC is a “must-have” for me.

        • I’ve had some variant of a “homelab” for probably 15 years, maybe more. For a long time, I was plagued with crashes, random errors, etc. Once I stopped using consumer-grade parts and switched over to actual server hardware, these problems went away completely. I can actually use my homelab as the core of my home network instead of just something fun to play with. Some of this improvement is probably due to better power supplies, storage, server CPUs, etc, but ECC memory could very well play a part. This is just anecdotal, though.
        • ECC memory has saved me before. One of the memory modules in my NAS went bad; ECC detected the error, corrected it, and TrueNAS sent me an alert. Since most of the RAM in my NAS is used for a ZFS cache, this likely would have caused data loss had I been using non-error-corrected memory. Because I had ECC, I was able to shut down the server, pull the bad module, and start it back up with maybe 10 minutes of downtime as the worst result of the failed module.

        I don’t care about ECC in my desktop PCs, but for anything “mission-critical,” which is basically everything in my server rack, I don’t feel safe without it. Pfsense is probably the most critical service, so whatever machine is running it had better have ECC.

        I switched from bare-metal to a VM for largely the same reason you did. I was running Pfsense on an old-ish Supermicro server, and it was pushing my UPS too close to its power limit. It’s crazy to me that yours only pulled 40 watts, though; I think I saved about 150-175W by switching it to a VM. My entire rack contains a NAS, a Proxmox server, a few switches, and a couple of other miscellaneous things. Total power draw is about 600-650W, and jumps over 700W under a heavy load (file transfers, video encoding, etc). I still don’t like the idea of having Pfsense on a VM, though; I’d really like to be able to make changes to my Proxmox server without dropping connectivity to the entire property. My UPS tops out at 800W, though, so if I do switch back to bare-metal, I only have realistically 50-75W to spare.

  • MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    95·
    2 months ago

    Doesn’t work for me on Firefox mobile. Neither “mobile” site or Desktop versions. Hitting “Next/Enter” on my keyboard does nothing, there is no Submit button that I can see, and refreshing the page just resets all fields to defaults.

    I don’t want an Intel with 4gb RAM and a 256GB spinning drive, and OS included? No dice, that’s what I’m offered. Without being able to filter results, its just another craigslist/amazon/newegg front-end … a less useful one.

    EDIT: Turns out there are zero fanless non-Intel, 16+GB RAM, 1024+GB SSD/eMMC offerings with USB-C to list. Strange no-one is packaging an OrangePi 5 Plus like so, but I haven’t seen a fanless heat-sink sufficient to make that a good idea anyways.

    I had tweaked some of the options, but without clearing either-or-both of those last two, especially “fan-less”, all I was getting was the five sponsored “results” the top, which changed just enough to make it seem like that’s all the results I could get.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
    PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
    RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
    ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

    5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.

    [Thread #974 for this sub, first seen 17th Sep 2024, 00:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    Anyone have experience with external HDD enclosures? I currently have two 3.5" HDDs, and I’d like room for two or three more. Reliability is pretty important to me, so something that’ll cut out periodically isn’t going to work.

    • pirat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      I’m in the same situation as you, more or less… I have three new 22TB drives that need an enclosure, preferably for JBOD (no hardware RAID needed) but I can’t figure out which ones are actually good products… I don’t mind using a random-brand product if it’s actually solid.

      I find it very difficult to figure out which ones will support my 22TB drives. And for some of them, it seems, it’s impossible to add new drives to empty slots later (because of hardware RAID, I guess?), which has made me hesitant in buying one with more slots than I have drives, in case they can’t be utilized later on anyway…

      I was looking at the QNAP TR-004 which was mentioned by someone else somewhere on Lemmy some months ago, but IIRC it would be impossible to use the fourth slot later if the drive isn’t included in the hardware RAID configuration…

      EDIT: I have also been looking into so-called “backplanes” as an alternative, since they seem to do the job and are cheaper, but I’m unsure if I’ll need a PC chassis/case/tower for that to actually work?

      If you find something good (products or relevant info), feel free to share it with me.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Yeah, I don’t understand why JBOD with a decent chipset is so hard to find. I really don’t expect much from it, I just want to slide some drives in and have everything run consistently for a few months at a time. I’ll power cycle periodically to apply updates, so I’m not looking for 24/7/365 operation or anything.

        FWIW, Level1Techs seems to recommend MediaSonic (timestamp is where he talks about reliability), but doesn’t give it a ringing endorsement. And that was one of the better ones he’s seen…

        After a bunch of research, what I’ve found is:

        • okay chipset, but garbage build quality (no dampening for drives, no hot-swap, etc)
        • fancy controller that doesn’t support JBOD - non-starter for me, I don’t want anything to do with hw controllers
        • expensive - at a certain point, I’ll just keep my oversized ATX case that does the job

        Now I’m looking for compact cases that support 5 drives, like this one (a little too cheap perhaps?) or this one. It just seems reliable 4-5 bay USB-C enclosures just aren’t that popular.

      • SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        I’ve run a TR-004 for the last 5 years haven’t had any reliability issues so far. In hardware raid modes, drives are hot swappable but you can’t grow the array without wiping it. I’m JBOD mode you need to power off before swapping drives. The main problem I’ve had is their chipset is only partially supported by smartmontools due to proprietary crap so there is some strange behaviour there.

        • pirat@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          Thanks for your response. Much appreciated. Do I understand it correctly that I’ll be able to add more drives later in JBOD mode, but I’ll simply have to power it off before adding or swapping drives?

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Makes sense for single drives, but if I go with USB, it’ll be something like this with multiple bays, which will almost certainly support UASP. I also don’t want a hardware RAID controller because I’d much rather my BTRFS filesystem handle the individual drives than rely on some controller to not corrupt my data.

        The problem, however, is that a lot of these enclosures use really crappy components. Sometimes drives will drop off for no reason and the entire unit will need to be power cycled. They also tend to require a separate power supply, which is also annoying. But if there’s a super high quality one for pretty cheap, the entire package (mini PC + enclosure) is probably smaller than pretty much any equivalent case. So I’m interested, I just haven’t found a good fit.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            TerraMaster, Orico

            I honestly have never used either of these, yet they show up at a lot of retailers.

            ASUS is a bit sketchy these days IMO, so I try to avoid them.

            • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              2 months ago

              Well, if you have your preference, go with it. The base thing is to stick with a company with a solid reputation that was a warranty and isn’t disappearing overnight.

        • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          IME, they’re all the same chipset/set of chipsets and are all pretty awful.

          That said, the most reliable ones I’ve found actually come from drives that have been shucked. Western Digital or whomever aren’t going to do the absolute lowest price piece of shit enclosure for something they’re going to warranty for 3 or 5 years, so those have been what I try to find and have had reasonable luck with them in terms of reliability and not-catching-shit-on-fire.

          Usually cheap as shit on eBay or whatever, since they’re basically the packaging trash around something that was purchased for the gooey insides.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            I’m more interested in multi-bay enclosures, but as you said, the chipsets tend to be kinda crappy. And that’s what makes me hesitate to use these mini PCs, my use-case is for a NAS, but these enclosures are kind of expensive and seem to have pretty poor components.

            So for now, I’m using larger cases to hold the drives. But it takes up a lot of desk space, so these mini PCs are very attractive, if I can get a compact external enclosure to work.

            • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
              2·
              2 months ago

              Yeah, I’ve never seen a multi-bay enclosure that doesn’t just randomly decide it’s done with this bullshit and have random dropouts or just plain fucking off entirely.

              I don’t know WHY they’re so bad, but they are :/

              I just converted part of a closet to a network closet and added some shelves and stuffed everything in there, though I know that’s not an option everyone has.

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                1·
                2 months ago

                Yeah, I’d need to run cable if I moved my machines to a closet, and I’m putting that off. I do plan to do that though, so maybe someday. :)

                • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
                  2·
                  2 months ago

                  Yeah I ran ethernet everywhere when I bought my house and it’s fantastic. Multi-gig everywhere!

                  I’m also never fucking doing that again because the builder of my house must have gotten a fantastic fucking deal 120 years ago on 2x4s, because they decided to do a narrow cross-bracing between studs on every damn wall, so I had fucking rock-hard old growth 2x4s to drill through every 14 inches or so in every damn wall I was running cables on.

                  Killed several hundred dollars in drill bits and other tools (broke a few fish tapes!) getting this shit done, AND it took like a month to get finished and then the walls patched where I had to cut into it to see what in the fuck the drill was hitting.

                  But yeah, ethernet everywhere is great!

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    22·
    2 months ago

    Just use eBay directly

    Also a lot of these listings are junk. The want $100 for like $50 worth of hardware. I personally am waiting for the market to get a little more sane

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        It isn’t bad I just think it is important to keep in mind many if the listings are deliberately misleading.

        Side note I wonder who will buy that listing. It has jumped in popularity thanks to lemmy

        • mahin@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          Yes, maybe I should add this somewhere: ‘This is an automated tool. Please read the listing and confirm the specifications before ordering.’