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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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
I have a NAS for storage. The pi sips power, doesn’t make any sound, and runs what I need.
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 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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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.
Any post-2015 laptop would work. Look around in your local recycling bins :D
A refurbished Dell optiplex has been my move. Hasn’t failed me yet.
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.
University surplus. I work for a university and we get rid of stuff all tfe time that is still very useful.
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.
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.
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.
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… 🥺
I use Intel NUCs off eBay for this kind of stuff. A few years ago you could get one for ~$200 on eBay.
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.
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.
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.
I would pickup a old workstation of of a site like eBay. Last time I was shopping around they were pretty cheap but that was pretty insanity pricing
Yep. Assuming you’re in the US, searching eBay for “Dell optiplex” is the way to go.
Those are mostly used by companies that upgrade their entire fleet in one go so they sell the old ones for cheap in great condition.
