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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Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PSU Power Supply Unit SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
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Any post-2015 laptop would work. Look around in your local recycling bins :D
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would gladly pay shipping for a server donation… 🥺
@uenticx @qwestjest78 Wish I lived near you 😊
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.
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.
+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.?
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.
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.
Why tho?
For $250 you can build a pretty solid system with lots of storage
I have a NAS for storage. The pi sips power, doesn’t make any sound, and runs what I need.
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.
I just use whatever trash and old computer parts I have lying around.
A refurbished Dell optiplex has been my move. Hasn’t failed me yet.
Find something on craigslist or local pickup on ebay, check government/police surplus, or do some freecycling. At least in my area a lot of people leave their e-waste computers at Best Buy, often in the doorway, nobody cares if you come and pick them up. Even if they’re broken (and they’re often perfectly functional and sometimes surprisingly powerful) it likely only takes a few before you’ve got some functional combination of parts.
It’s likely not as much of a picker’s heaven anymore since I imagine the huge wave of windows-10-obsolete computers being thrown away for no reason has probably mostly subsided, but there is so much old and perfectly functional stuff out there it’s really unjustifiable to be buying something new especially at today’s modern prices.
I purchase a bunch of machines off government auction, patch then up, and pass them back out for very little. Anything with 4 cores and 8 GB memory should do it. If you can get something with DDR4, that’s a big step. Bonus points of it was made after 2018.
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.
I use a nucbox mini pc and two usb ext hdds to run a jellyfin server and a samba file server. Works great. Im using Lubuntu – i dont exactly recommend it, but it works fine enough. Any lite Linux distro would probably work great. Here’s a picture of my janky “server rack” setup:
University surplus. I work for a university and we get rid of stuff all tfe time that is still very useful.
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.
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
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.
Dell optiplex
