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

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨week⁩ 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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ohshit604@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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iturnedintoanewt@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
My server is an HP Small Form Factor Corei5 32GB RAM that I bought on a second hand shop. The thing I paid attention the most was the i5’s gen, as some older ones don’t include h265 transcoding acceleration, or sometimes h264. This is rather important for Jellyfin. ANything else, just go with it and try!

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- mhz@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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  - iturnedintoanewt@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Thanks for specifying. You are correct, and that is exactly the CPU I have in my SFF, too.
    
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Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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PoopMonster@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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Shady_Shiroe@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
My current home server that runs three dozen containers including Plex and Emby as well as two dozen other services and many terabytes of data is literally an old Lenovo desktop I got for free out of somebody’s garage in 14 years ago. So yeah

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neatobuilds@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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

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ashenone@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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skribe@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It depends, but probably. I use 5-10yo laptops running Debian.

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CaptainPedantic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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
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Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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TinyRhino@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Hardware requirements really depend on what you want to do with the server. I have a few raspberry pi, an old PC, and at least one or two old laptops to host things on. But really, I use the old PC the most. It pulls more power than a raspberry pi, but I’ve found it to be much more reliable and stable.

Drop some additional hard drives if you need a media server. More memory & CPU if you are doing things like manipulating images or transcoding video. I run a webserver and host various subdomains for things I don’t want to pay to host. Plus working samples of my portfolio projects. I keep my actual portfolio on cloudflare, but link out to these work samples.

I also host some other apps that are just for my home network. Everything works great on a 10 year old PC sitting in a network closet. You are very likely not in need of professional server hardware.

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southernbeaver@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I think that’s preferable. I have resused my old gaming computer as a server since I stopped gaming for a while.

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