I used Zimaboards. They are affordable and all you need if you couple the cluster with a TrueNAS Scale box and setup Democratic CSI.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
17 points (94.7% liked)
Selfhosted
59450 readers
1360 users here now
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.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
-
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Like the original Zimaboard? How do you like it? Reading online in forums or reddit, the feedback is really mixed.
I was looking at the Zimaboard 2, but the board alone is like 300€+ and then buying DDR5 with current prices...
I personally have a handful of pi’s doing things, with plans to get more to do more (I have one in the mail to become my OpenWRT router). I was thinking of getting something simple to be able to do STT and TTS as I want to replace my HomePods as I slowly leave Apple and have have no interest in joining Amazon or Google for home automation, so I looked at my university’s used computers. I am not really a fan of buying some random persons old hardware but maybe a business is selling their old stuff.
I assume you are using pi 4 and/or 5? I would have some 3b+ laying around which don't see any use nowadays. But can't quite imagine to build a cluster only made up of these, I think they are too underpowered, unless being used as like a small additional worker node.
And buying new Pi 5 with 16GB of memory would set me back at least 200€ a unit, not including power supply or any case.
Even used stuff is expensive nowadays.
Anyway, you can buy these used refurbished small form factor business PC's.
These things: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/
I was recently at a tech conference and I met a guy who was selling 16 gb ram one's for 30 usd, since they had managed to track them down that cheap in bulk somewhere. What happens is that corporations or govt get rid of them due to warranty expiry, so they need to be offloaded somewhere.
You probably won't be able to find them that cheap but it's definitely more affordable than new stuff. It used to be cheaper but I mostly see 200 usd in my searches.
Even used stuff is expensive nowadays.
No shit! I was shopping NewEgg for some used drives. Found a 500 GB HDD for $36 USD which I immediately clicked on only to find this warning:
Used - Very Good Erased (DoD 5220.22 M Compliant) and tested. There may be drives that have up to 25 bad sectors. There may be writing or >markings on the drive or the label may vary slightly from picture.
WTF. Who would buy a used HDD with up to 25 bad sectors?
@irmadlad @moonpiedumplings Enterprise drives w/ bad sectors and a 5yr warranty? Me (raises hand)!
With snapraid and backups and the warranty, I'm perfectly happy to use enterprise drives _where the drive errors aren't increasing_. Worst case, I lose some of those linux distributions and have to re-download them. I wouldn't use one without a warranty though (and I certainly wouldn't waste my time on a 500gb drive, the last hdd I bought w/ sector errors was 14TB for $140).
14TB for $140).
Link me up, Scotty
(raises hand)!
Really. I would have never guessed. I mean, I've always viewed bad sectors as a sign of a failing drive. Just a really bad day in the future, marked as an appointment.
What kind of millage on the average do you get out of something like that?
@irmadlad I can't tell you averages (I'm not running massive storage servers with hundreds of drives here), but I ordered this particular one in Oct 2025. It's still going strong. There's another one that I bought back in 2019 or 2020 that I used for a few years before replacing it due to needing more space. Meanwhile, I've used plenty of consumer drives over the years that were a lot less reliable, so I have different rules for consumer drives (toss 'em at the first error) vs enterprise drives.
@irmadlad Also, I would think that companies offering long warranties on refurbished drives are playing the odds in a way that makes them money. It probably wouldn't be profitable if they sold drives w/ bad/reallocated sectors and the majority of them died within the warranty period.
My assumption is that all drives will die (or suffer corruption) at the worst possible time, so do proper backup/scrubbing. Then look for deals where I can.
i have no idea.
i personally bin (recycle bin, that is) any drive (ssd or hdd) that has any abnormality in its internal diagnostics data, or won't pass short and long diagnostics tests even if their stats are clean.
I've heard this dude named @Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it he uses them. I've never heard of that. TIL
Thanks for the link! I think I saw this project mentioned in some other post as well, but honestly didn't look further into it then.
Oh wow 30 bucks a unit for 16 GB, that's just insanely lucky to find a deal like that.
Looking around in my region, there is from time to time the odd deal where you could get for example a HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini with 16 gigs for like below 200€ if you're lucky and with the right timing. But usually they will net you 260€ upwards.
Nothing fancy—I’m looking for 1 or 2 mini servers or SFF with at least 16GB of memory and a decent CPU (4–6 cores)
Not in the EU, so......
The Optiplex 7020 SFF with the i7-4790 chip are pretty robust little computers, regularly sell on Amazon for less than $200. The 9020 MT is a bit older, however still capable @ well under $200 USD on Amazon. I'd upgrade the 9020 to a i7-4790 chip which you can normally find, used, on ebay for less than $50 USD. The models in that range take DDR3 which you can find good prices for at https://www.memorystock.com/. I've been using them for years. The bad part about shopping for used computers on ebay is that, while you might be able to find some killer deals initially, most often they stick it to you good with shipping.
Also: Dell OptiPlex 3050 Micro Not too shabby either.
I just recently got a Optiplex 9020 MT 16 GB RAM for $124 USD / free shipping off of Amazon. Shopped around ebay for the i7-4790 which cost me $35 USD, and 16 GB DDR3 RAM for $50. Not a bad little set up for right at the $200 USD mark. I'm setting it up for a friend of mine's son who wants to get into selfhosting at the age of 10. It's no threadripper but a solid piece.
Dunno about Europe, but if anyone is reading this from America, here you go:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=dell+optiplex&_sacat=0&_sop=15&rt=nc&LH_BIN=1
They are a little more expensive than the last time I looked, but still cheaper than raspberry pi.
Honest question, why are you looking to buy hardware to do this when you can mess with K8S in VMs on your existing proxmox host?
Fair point. If I don't want to just run a single node cluster, I will need at least 2-3 nodes aka VMs. Looking at like 2-4GB (as a bare minimum imho) memory for each, I would already eat into like half of my current 16GB of available memory. And this mini server is already running a lot of my critical apps, using more than half of the memory.
I run a single node cluster.
My single node has 256 gb of ram and 24 cores. I do this because, if you want a lot of ram/cores/storage, it is cheaper to get a used "tower server" type device and then upgrade it as you go over time, than it is to buy entirely new devices for every bit of ram you want to add to the cluster.
I like kubernetes because I like configuration as code, gitops, the way it abstracts over components so I can swap components out easily, the way that helm charts are an easier way of orchestrating containers, and a bunch of other things.
Clustering is merely one of many benefits of kubernetes, one that isn't particularly important to me. Although, my opinion on that has changed somewhat recently. Waiting for a reboot is annoying, since I am rebooting the whole thing and I have to wait for each service to go down or come up before the machine reboots properly. But if I was running kubernetes as a virtual machines inside incus with multiple nodes, I could update each node one by one without the whole thing going down. Or, I could snapshot them, allowing me to reboot the host without waiting for kubernetes. But these things are mostly just somewhat nice to have, rather than a core feature I really require.
Oh wow okay, if I'd go down that route I would definitely do multiple VMs on that host. In my opinion, the whole clustering and self healing / HA aspect of Kubernetes is why I want to switch to it. I can do gitops with Podman/Docker as well, in fact I already do that including a renovate pipeline on my sel-hosted Forgejo instance. But having the redundancy of several nodes, if one goes down the service will still work or at least will be re-deployed within a couple of seconds, provided there is distributed storage (longhorn, ceph or even nfs cis) if its a stateful app.
That's fair.