Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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My answer would basically be yes, but. An old desktop (or even laptop) can definitely be used and will run fine. It should be very easy to get one for free or very cheap as companies will typically write them off after 3-5 years.
However, you might want to consider power consumption. Running a desktop 24/7 will use a lot more power than a new MiniPC or a NUC, so you may want to calculate how much it'll cost to run a desktop 24/7 compared to a device that only uses 5W or whatever, and see whether the upfront savings make up for what you'll pay in electricity over a certain period.
I think you might actually want to look into second hand MiniPCs unless you absolutely need to fit a bunch of hard drives in a case (like you probably would with Jellyfin).
Also I want to echo what others are saying about noise. A desktop or rack mounted server will make more noise than a laptop or MiniPC.
That depends. A lot of the power consumption comes from spinning media. Even very old desktop Intel chips have CPU throttling and consume very little while idle. Corporate desktops, even old ones, are usually quite economical.