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When building a home server, could a used/cheap PC do the job? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 21 hours ago by SpiceDealer@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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I've never done any sort of home networking or self-hosting of any kind but thanks to Jellyfin and Mastodon I've become interested in the idea. As I understand it, physical servers ("bare metal" correct?) are PCs intended for data storing and hosting services instead of being used as a daily driver like my desktop. From my (admittedly) limited research, dedicated servers are a bit expensive. However, it seems that you can convert an old PC and even laptop into a server (examples here and here). But should I use that or are there dedicated servers at "affordable" price points. Since is this is first experience with self-hosting, which would be a better route to take?

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[–] Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com 29 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (4 children)

Heck yeah! Old desktops or laptops are how most of us got started.

Things to consider:

Power- this will be on 24/7 probably. That adds up
Speed- not just CPU, but RAM, disk access and network interface can limit how much data you want to move.
Noise- fans can suck (pun intended). Laptops tend to run quieter

I'm sort of looking to upgrade and N100 or N150's are looking good. Jellyfin can do transcoding so that takes a little grunt. This box would work well for me. It's not a storage solution, but can run docker and a handful of services.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

While laptop batteries may not have aged well, especially if they're left discharged, one other nice perk is that laptops effectively have an integrated UPS.

[–] lka1988@sh.itjust.works 3 points 18 hours ago

Some laptops (Thinkpads in particular) are capable of limiting the battery level via a Linux application called tlp so it doesn't go pop when plugged in 24/7.

[–] rem26_art@fedia.io 3 points 21 hours ago

adding on to Noise, if you do end up in a situation where you're considering buying refurbished enterprise hard disks, know that they are louder than normal consumer drives, esp if you have 4 of them running at once in a NAS

[–] AliasVortex@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

I wanted to echo this by saying that my lab stated as 4 bay Qnap NAS and evolved into repurposed consumer hardware as my interests and needs changed. My current server is an Optiplex that I bought for being small, quiet, and hanging lots of cores and my NAS is just my old gaming PC build with an HBA card (for extra SATA lanes) stuffed into a fancy case. A server is any computer that you say is a server (ideally one with functional network connectivity).

[–] Heikki@lemm.ee 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I've been running a plex server on an old desktop bought in 2016. Mostly streaming movies and tv shows to my family. I have a 2 TB SSD and a spare 2TB HDD. I was thinking about getting a mini PC to swap out the larger desktop. Could I get a larg HDD and ad it in an enclosure to the Mini PC to handle the media volume?

[–] RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 1 points 14 hours ago

Could I get a larg HDD and ad it in an enclosure to the Mini PC to handle the media volume?

Like an external USB drive? Absolutely.