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

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨SpiceDealer@lemmy.dbzer0.com⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

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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fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
My current server runs 40ish docker containers and has 24TB of disk space in a ZFS array.

It is a 11 year old Intel chip and mobo. I have been thinking about updating it simply because of power draw, but it works just fine.

I did add in PCI risor boards to get PCI 3.0 NVME drives in there.

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Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I started with an old and half-broken laptop. Keyboard war busted.

Worked fine for months, then choosed to upgrade because I started hosting jellyfin and the laptop was unable to transcode on the fly…

You are fine with whatever hardware you have lying around… You can always grow later

Keep an eye for energy consumption tough… Too old stuff might be less efficient running 24/7 depending on your kW/h cost.

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sixty@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I just got a great Jellyfin+*arr setup running off of an old PC. Let me know if you need a hand

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ohshit604@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This was maybe 2-3ish years ago;

I started with a raspberry pi 4 bundle from Amazon, played around with the Linux filesystem, bash shell, APT package manager and just kept reinstalling the headless Debian 12 OS if I believed to have bricked it beyond repair.

Eventually learned about the Docker Engine & Docker Compose and that essentially gave access to a plethora of software I would’ve have never have used before.

The raspberry pi 4 started to show sluggishness as I started piling more and more services on it so, Instead of buying traditional server grade hardware I liked the small form factor of the Pi so I opted for a 13th gen Asus Nuc with an 12 core i7.

Everything runs beautifully now.

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lapping147@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’m running my Proxmox VE on a small asus mini pc with embedded cpu. It can’t even match a 5 year old i3 and I’m having no issues.

Running mainly containers and small projects

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_cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Let’s put it this way, I’m hosting about 30 Docker containers including a full Servarr stack, Jellyfin, and Mastodon on an old Dell workstation intended for office work.

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PieMePlenty@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
If you aren’t worried about power costs, yes, it’s worth it.

I calculated the power cost required to run a 100w PC 24/7 for 2 years, equals a new mini PC. So I just bought a NUC which draws 7-8W. Less noisy too.

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pHr34kY@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
My server is always my old desktop hardware. It’s a 4th-gen i5 with 16GB RAM and it’s keeping up fine. I have thrown quite a lot of work at it too. If you avoid containers, you can serve 20 services off it no problem.

I too, was worried about power costs. Every time I do the maths, the new hardware will be obsolete by the time I make the money back in savings. If you’re concerned about environmental impact, the initial manufacture of hardware does more damage than running it over its lifetime.

Dive into an e-waste bin.

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deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Anything you need to buy is more expensive than anything you already have.

Especially if youre worried about power costs.

Reuse wha you have, replace when you need to.

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Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I use my previous desktop and a rando openbox thinclient I picked up at Bestbuy for like $250 in a proxmox cluster. The desktop does the heavy lifting on stuff like jellyfin transcoding, immich ML, or just general fucking about with things that require a more powerful GPU (got a 3080ti in there)

The thinclient handles all the lighter stuff that needs to be constantly available, like my traefik instance, dns/dhcp server, etc

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werefreeatlast@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I started with handmedowns donated to my by someone from mastodon that was getting rid of junk computers. All tiny think stations.

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qaz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Old PC’s and especially laptops (make sure to consider removing the battery though) make great homeservers. You can run dozens of services on old hardware.

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- pHr34kY@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Leave the battery in and you have a free UPS. Perhaps set it capped at 80% charge to increase its lifespan.
  
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SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
My home server is made of literal garbage.

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Presi300@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yeah, any relatively modern used PC will be more than enough

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Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I use my former PC as the home server. It is probably 10+ years old, has no M2 slot or something, but an SSD for the OS. More than big and fast enough for all my needs: File service (Samba), Web service (apache2), Wiki service (mediawiki), Database (MySQL), Calendar service (Radicale), Project service (Subversion), and probably some others I forgot. All of it running on Ubuntu Server, aministrated by WebMin.

The only investment I did when I turned this into a server was that I put 2x8TB in it as a RAID for bulk storage - I dump the family PCs backups on that machine, too.

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qzrt@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Servers are just computers, you build what you are going to use it for. You can use a cheap N100 mini pc to host jellyfin as the important part there is the video encoder/decoder to transcode video. Though it can only do 2 streams at 4k with tone mapping. So it might not be good enough if you have more than 2 people using it or are running more stuff on it.

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iturnedintoanewt@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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- mhz@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You definitely want an 8th gen (Intel) or better to have Jellyfin Quick Sync support. It’s what I have (i5-8400T) and it offer a fairly decent AVC (h264) and HEVC (h265) transcoding for my usage. However, for futur proofing consider an 11th gen for the AV1 support.
  
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LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I installed a Linux server on an old laptop, then installed Jellyfin. It’s like a Walmart special from 8 years ago, so no graphics card outside of the integrated graphics. Doesn’t matter. I disabled sleep, and power saving settings on the Wi-Fi. I had a USB external 1tb drive hooked to it. The laptop doesn’t even have support for a 5ghz wifi connection. No issues at all. I can run 2 movies at 1080p in different rooms off the external USB drive without issue. Just go for it. I installed RustDesk on it so wherever I am I can remote to it, turn on the VPN and kick off a torrent for whatever movie someone mentioned while at work or what not. Then when I get home it’s there.

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Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
When I started my home server was an old laptop, eventually it became an old desktop, and now it’s server specific hardware. My recommendation is use whatever you have at hand unless you have specific reasons. I went from laptop to desktop because I needed more disk space, and went to specialized hardware for practical reasons (less space, less electricity, easily accessible hot swappable hard drives). But for most of the stuff I have there an old laptop would still be enough, heck, a raspberry pi would be enough for most of it.

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jia_tan@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Servers are just really big computers. I started off with a Chinese Raspberry Pi clone, then upgraded to an old mac mini + mini pc + a cheap cloud server (VPS). As you can see, you can turn any old computer into a server.

The cloud is expensive but reliable. Having your own server is cheap but it will go offline with every network fault or brownout. If you’re serious about self hosting I suggest buying a UPS.

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hellequin67@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
My home media server is an old nuc mini pc i5 16Gb RAM with attached usb storage running on a Linux distro, runs Jellyfin and a few other applications for the household.

In short yes, an old pc will work fine.

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- Oaksey@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  These also have the advantage of being nice and quiet, which if you are going to have it in your house rather than a hot garage or whatever can be nice.
  I bought a NAS, later realised that it supported Plex and Jellyfin but it was often too slow to do the transcoding. I still use it for storage but there were no real upgrade options. It was cheaper to get an old NUC, rather than replace the NAS with a high spec one to be able to run Jellyfin properly.
  
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- treyf711@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’m doing a very similar thing with ann old Dell thin client. I did inherit a large server from a company that was upgrading, but I’ve been thinking about downsizing a lot lately so now I use a few small computers on a 10 inch rack.
  
  the best server is one that you already have
  
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paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
My server pc is just my old computer parts. Ryzen 3 2200G with with 6Gb of RAM. It gets the job done!

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ollioddi@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I have 3 servers at home. The main is an AMD epyc server. Very nice hardware. The other two, are cheap 13 and 14 Gen Intel i3s (14100t) and they work like a charm, despite being cheap consumer grade hardware. For self hosting, a server is just any computer. Unless you need the features or reliability of enterprise hardware, basically anything can be used. Do it

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korsart@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
There’s no right way, really. You can turn almost anything into a server.

If you have old hardware laying around I suggest you start with that. When you’re comfortable with setting everything up and using it on your day to day, then it’s time to invest into hardware.

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hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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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- prenatal_confusion@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Wondering if you have and insight on power usage with the a310 in the system while idling. I built a sub 25w server and don’t want to mess that up.
  
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  - hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Sorry, but I don’t know. I use an A380 in my system. I got it before the A310 was available.
    
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whostosay@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I bought a used m920q for this reason, still working on it, I’m at the docker-compose phase

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PoopMonster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I have two servers/mini lab / whatever you want to call em. Ones running unraid and is my main server Frankensteined from an old mini itx mobo off of ebay with an Intel quicksync capable cpu. And the others a $80 Lenovo m93p that I just installed Ubuntu server + casa os to mess around with it.

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NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yes, you can easily do it.

You want to look at 2 things: 1. Noise 2. Ratio of performance / power usage.

Noise

When your PC runs 24/7 then it might be annoying to hear it’s noise sometimes. Real server cases are usually even much louder than former PC’s because they are built for super strong air flow inside.

Think carefully what you need. In my situation it is just one light wooden door away from my bed, so I wanted it impossible to hear. I optimized it so, and it ended up being so quiet that I cannot hear any fans, but I hear the clicking of the harddisks all the time. Well, I got used to that, mostly. For my next home server I want to build my own case that absolutely blocks this noise.

Ratio of performance / power usage

People are frequently asking what if I turn this old Pentium etc. into a server?

Well, these old CPU’s have very low performance compared to new ones, but it might just be sufficient. But then you recognize that the old veterans burn 100 Watts for the same performance where a modern (low performance) CPU burns only 5 Watts, and now it will do that 24/7. Think about your yearly costs. Many times it turns out that buying a new one saves your money very easily.
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Shady_Shiroe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Its less of a need for powerful hardware and more of a want.

I started off my days with a laptop that had a broken screen. I took screen off and hid it behind my desk, worked perfectly fine, even came with a built in backup battery too xD

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Konraddo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
You could ask the question for video gaming. Can a used computer do the job? Yes, but you may not be able to play cutting edge / demanding games if your computer lacks the appropriate hardware. It really depends what kind of things you want to do, for choosing hardware that’s powerful enough.

Jellyfin? You need to consider if you need transcoding. Transcode or not makes quite a difference on the hardware needs.

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