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

hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

Absolutely yes. It’s better to use an old PC for a home server, because upgrades are cheaper, parts are easier to find, troubleshooting is generally easier, they’re usually more energy efficient than an older dedicated server, and you’re saving an old pc from becoming e-waste.

That being said, what you want to run on it determines how old/cheap of a PC could work for you.

Jellyfin works best when you can do hardware encoding, and these days that means throwing an ARC A310 in there and calling it a day. If you have a new enough processor, you don’t even need the graphics card.

Mastodon is pretty disk heavy, but if you’ve got a nice hard disk to put the Minio server on and an SSD for the db, you’re golden. That’s how I run port87.social. It’s running on an old 6th gen Intel i7. The PC I built in 2015 (with a few upgrades).

Basically unless you’re trying to run AI models on it, cheap hardware is fantastic for personal servers.

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