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.
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So I trick for the double drives is to pop in a low profile usb drive and install the os on that. Then you can use the ssd/hdd for other things.
So you leave the usb plugged in for boot and then you are good after that?
Yup! If you installed the os on it.
So you have one usb with the iso flashed to it and a second to install the os on. Use the first to install to the second.
Make sure the OS is good for that, or you use a very high endurance USB drive, or you use two drives in a mirror and are prepared to replace them. Most USB drives are not designed for constant use, like the log writes your OS will be doing.
You can mount /var and /tmp to the ssd, lot of tutorials on doing this for Pis SD cards if your googling.
I use Intel NUCs off eBay for this kind of stuff. A few years ago you could get one for ~$200 on eBay.
If you want a NAS on the cheap my preference is just get any cheap “normal” PC, a case with a good amount of HDD bays. Move the drives into the PC, and you have all the expand ability you could dream of. You can find plenty of DDR4 machines for cheap now. Then as ram prices come down you can go up to 128gb of ram as long as your board has 4 slots.
Anything on craigslist/FB marketplace will work.
This is the ticket. I got an enormous case in trade with a hoarder buddy, used mobo/cpu on ebay, new cheapo PSU, etc
Still just have 3 drives in but space for like 10 of them once I install the 2x cd bay hdd holder that fits a few more drives.
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
Set aside some for surge protection/UPS
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.
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.
There are good lists of alternatives out there. For Germany, I like this one: https://lmaa.space/
A refurbished Dell optiplex has been my move. Hasn’t failed me 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.
If you want a lot of cores, there are xeon kits on aliexpress and other websites, xeon e5-2650 v4 or v3 has a lot of cores and consume very few energy, mainly the v4 (comparing to other server cpus), it has a lot of pci express lanes, etc.
Consume very few energy
Don’t go with ancient hardware if you are wanting energy efficiency
mainly the v4 (comparing to other server cpus)
It consumes less energy than the other server cpus from intel that are generally available.
Except the hardware itself is really old which means that the performance will be much lower and thus the CPU usage will be higher. The older systems also have much slower memory and bus speeds.
You would be much better buying a more modern consumer CPU since the performance boost will mean that the CPU utilization will be lower. Most workloads including Jellyfin do not benefit from tons of slow CPU cores. Things will work better the higher CPU and ram frequently you have.
Server CPUs are a poor choice outside of very specific applications
My E5-2667 v4 (8 cores, higher frequency) using almost nothing of energy while watching some asmr on freetube and responding:
Edit: it has a higher tdp than the 2650 v4, and has 16gb of ddr4 ram
11W is actually a lot lower than what I was expecting. It isn’t crazy efficient but it isn’t bad.
Are you sure it supports DDR4? The Intel spec page says it has a clock of around 2.5GHz with DDR3 memory
From dmidecode, DDR4:
Edit: Broadwell supports both DDR3 and DDR4, with some caveats
Handle 0x0073, DMI type 17, 40 bytes Memory Device Array Handle: 0x0070 Error Information Handle: Not Provided Total Width: 72 bits Data Width: 72 bits Size: 8 GiB Form Factor: DIMM Set: None Locator: DIMM_B1 Bank Locator: NODE 1 Type: DDR4 Type Detail: Synchronous Speed: 2667 MT/s Manufacturer: Undefined Serial Number: A64010B5 Asset Tag: DIMM_B1_AssetTag Part Number: Rank: 1 Configured Memory Speed: 2400 MT/s Minimum Voltage: 1.14 V Maximum Voltage: 1.26 V Configured Voltage: 1.2 V Handle 0x0076, DMI type 17, 40 bytes Memory Device Array Handle: 0x0070 Error Information Handle: Not Provided Total Width: 72 bits Data Width: 72 bits Size: 8 GiB Form Factor: DIMM Set: None Locator: DIMM_D1 Bank Locator: NODE 1 Type: DDR4 Type Detail: Synchronous Speed: 2667 MT/s Manufacturer: Undefined Serial Number: A6401009 Asset Tag: DIMM_D1_AssetTag Part Number: Rank: 1 Configured Memory Speed: 2400 MT/s Minimum Voltage: 1.14 V Maximum Voltage: 1.26 V Configured Voltage: 1.2 V
The CPU may not use too much power, but the chipset and all the supporting circuitry will. Supporting 4/8channel memory aint free. And RAM can use a ton of power too.
Woot.com has lots of refurbs around that price.
It’s part of Amazon so you can use your Prime shipping.
Not much right now due to LLM training hogging all of the memory across the industry. Best bet is lightly used.
For a server like this 4GB of DDR4 is enough. And that is cheap still.
You you could do most of that with a raspberry pi5, 8GB. With a whole kit, you can get it for under $250. I’m running 3 at my place: 1 for media (servarr stack, JF, Navidrome, Invidious), 1 for the Fediverse (Mastodon, Piefed, Peertube, WordPress), and 1 for anything else.
Edit: I also missed the part about truenas, but you can still run containers on any other OS just fine.
The newer raspberry pis have gone up in price so much that the limited port selection is off putting to me now. You could pick up an older thinkcentre and do so much more.
Why tho?
For $250 you can build a pretty solid system with lots of storage
The key here is old hardware. I built a TrueNAS box out of an old Dell Optiplex 990. I got it from a friend for free but you can find one online for well under $200. Later you can upgrade the box bit-by-bit if you care to. I upgraded the case, motherboard, cooler, and power supply over time. It’s been a capable NAS for several years even though it’s using a 2nd gen Intel core i3.
