When building a home server, could a used/cheap PC do the job?

[sxan@midwest.social]

It depends on what you are running, but at one point I had an Odroid N2+ with 8GB RAM running Home Assistant, mpd, Snap server, zwavejs, mympd, jellyfin, and Calibre, all in containers, controlling the house and providing music for the sound system, playing movies, and with no issues. It ran for 7 years. So you don't need much; memory helps.

Oh - I take it back; after I put Jellyfin on it, it would struggle with transcoding. No GPU, old, weak CPU, whatever. But otherwise, it was fine.

At some point I realized I'd have to leave the computer with the house, because I have over 30 hardwired z-wave devices I'm not taking out if we sell, so I moved all of the services except Home Assistant and zwavejs to another computer.

My point is: old computers should be fine, assuming you're not trying to run LLMs on them. Or going heavy video transcoding. Just for serving up some web applications? You don't need much.

[ulrich@feddit.org]

If you already have one, it's a good place to start. However, power efficiency will be the biggest drawback. Power ain't free, and in some places it is very expensive. I'd recommend picking up some cheap ThirdReality switches and using them to monitor power consumption in Home Assistant.

[empireoflove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Any normal computer can become a "server", its all based on the software.
Most enterprise server hardware is expensive because its designed around demanding workloads where uptime and redundancy is important. For a goober wanting to start a Minecraft and Jellyfin server, any old PC will work.
For home labbers office PC's is the best way to do it. I have two machines right now that are repurposed office machines. They usually work well as office machines generally focus on having a decent CPU and plenty of memory without wasting money on a high end GPU, and can be had used for very cheap (or even free if you make friends that work in IT). And unless you're running a lot of game servers or want a 4k streaming box, even a mediocre PC from 2012 is powerful enough to do a lot of stuff on.

[Guest]

It really depends on what you're trying to do. At the end of the day, the foundational components are pretty standard across the board. All machines have a CPU, motherboard, storage mechanism, etc. Oftentimes those actual servers have a form factor better suited for rack mounting. They often have more powerful components.

But at the end of the day, the difference isn't as striking as most people not aware of this stuff think.

I'd say considering this is your first experience, you should start with converting an old PC due to the lower price point, and then expand as needed. You'll learn a lot and get a lot of experience from starting there.

[lmurch@thelemmy.club]

I love the vibe in this thread/community. You all seem like real cool cats. I appreciate that.

[valmond@lemmy.world]

Mine are lenovo thinkcentres, ypu xan get a good cpu, low power usage, up to 32GB RAM, one 2"5 drive + one nvme. Very easy to open and service.

[tal@lemmy.today]

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.

[voroxpete@sh.itjust.works]

I use a couple of old HP proliant mini towers. Relatively low power consumption, i7 CPUs and 32GB of RAM. I got mine from ewaste but it's the sort of thing you can easily find refurbed for the price of a high end Raspberry Pi.

[gedaliyah@lemmy.world]

I started out with an old laptop then eventually "upgraded" to a refurbished office surplus desktop. I highly recommend starting out on a project PC as a sort of proof of concept before investing any money into it. Even hosting the family media libraries, I have never had an issue with streaming video, etc. even with pretty dated hardware.

[captainpedantic@lemmy.world]

When I build my NAS/server last year, I bought a used Dell Optiplex from 2013 on eBay for $50. I tossed in an old SSD I had laying around, and squeezed in 42 TB worth of HDD drives. I added a PCIE SATA expansion card, and a 10 gig network card for 60 bucks to improve performance.

The only real downsides of doing it this way are

• No realistic way of upgrading hardware
• Limited space for internal drives
• No hardware transcoding abilities out of the box
• More power consumption than buying something newer

[heikki@lemm.ee]

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?

[Guest]

100%. That’s how I started, that’s how I continue to operate.
Currently have a few HP prodesk and elite desk mini pcs, my old desktop converted to be a proxmox node that runs OPNsense as a vm, and an even older desktop that runs TrueNAS.
However, I would like to replace my current truenas system with something newer and lower power as it consumes quite a bit for what it’s doing.

[naiboftabr@infosec.pub]

It is a fantastic idea to start your home server project on some e-waste hardware, and use it until you know specifically what features you're lacking that you would need better hardware for.

[aliasvortex@lemmy.world]

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).

[skribe@aussie.zone]

It depends, but probably. I use 5-10yo laptops running Debian.

[rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works]

I'll tell you a secret: my cool looking 4u server case with 8 hot swappable drive bays actually just houses my last gaming rig. Know what's going in there when I update my current rig?

This rig.

[jonne@infosec.pub]

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.

[ashenone@lemmy.ml]

Yea definitely. I started tinkering with my first server in 2020 and used an ewaste dell tower with an i7 3770 (8 years old at that point) and an old rx460 I had laying around. As others mentioned power consumption was way worse than modern hardware. But I had at one point a half dozen people streaming jellyfin 1080 content from it with no hiccups at all. That said I was running on linux, not sure how it would do if you run windows.

Right now I'm using a low power pc to run my server, again an old ewaste dell micro pc with a 5th or 6th gen i5 and no dedicated gpu. Still no problem streaming to my partners and I's phone/tablet simultaneously. Again, running linux.

[bdonvr@thelemmy.club]

Heck yeah. Not always the best for power efficiency though.

Old laptops also a great choice but I really recommend removing the battery first.

[neatobuilds@lemmy.today]

I started with my old gaming rig as a server, any decent intel cpu with quicksync is very good for plex and transcoding saving having to buy a cpu if you went with like a server grade cpu with no igpu