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

submitted 1 year 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 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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.