I’m trying to start out self-hosting and was looking for some good servers. I have a budget of ~100 USD and am in the US. I was initially going to get some type of raspberry pi but they seem to always be sold out here
I’m trying to start out self-hosting and was looking for some good servers. I have a budget of ~100 USD and am in the US. I was initially going to get some type of raspberry pi but they seem to always be sold out here
I’d go with something like this Lenovo M900 for $80-$90 used. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and find one with a single 8GB stick, then you can get another for ~$20 and you’ve got a quad core x84-64 machine with 16GB of RAM for right around $100.
The downside would be power consumption compared to a Pi if you’re trying to fit in a severely power-constrained setup, but the M900 will draw around 11-13W idle and 55W under higher load. so it’s not bad my any means.
^ Lenovo tiny thinkcenters are the best thing ever. Heck, I use the older haswell-era M73s that you can get for $30-40 on ebay and they’re amazing. Only drawback is no m.2 and no PCIe expandability but if you’re on a budget and want a starter homelab you can literally cluster 3 of these things for ~$100
Almost all of them that I’ve seen have CPUs that support Quick Sync which takes the heavy lifting off of the CPU if you have to do any transcoding with something like jellyfin or any other service with transcoding.
is there a good way to set up storage for a mini pc for something like plex or jellyfin?
I believe the M900 has both a SATA port and a M.2 slot, so some options for internal storage.
You could also plug in a big spinning drive via USB 3. USB 3 can move data faster than a magnetic drive can pull it off the platters.