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?
Heck yeah! Old desktops or laptops are how most of us got started.
Things to consider:
- Power- this will be on 24/7 probably. That adds up
- Speed- not just CPU, but RAM, disk access and network interface can limit how much data you want to move.
- Noise- fans can suck (pun intended). Laptops tend to run quieter
I’m sort of looking to upgrade and N100 or N150’s are looking good. Jellyfin can do transcoding so that takes a little grunt. This box would work well for me. It’s not a storage solution, but can run docker and a handful of services.
adding on to Noise, if you do end up in a situation where you’re considering buying refurbished enterprise hard disks, know that they are louder than normal consumer drives, esp if you have 4 of them running at once in a NAS
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).
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.
Some laptops (Thinkpads in particular) are capable of limiting the battery level via a Linux application called
tlpso it doesn’t go pop when plugged in 24/7.
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?
Could I get a larg HDD and ad it in an enclosure to the Mini PC to handle the media volume?
Like an external USB drive? Absolutely.
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.
Yeah, any relatively modern used PC will be more than enough
I bought a used m920q for this reason, still working on it, I’m at the docker-compose phase
Those are beasts! My homelab has three of them in a Proxmox cluster. I love that for not a ton of extra money you can throw in a PCIe expansion slot and the power consumption for all three is less than my second hand Dell Tower server.
Do you have any good resources I can look at to see if a cluster is something I should look into?
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
I just got a great Jellyfin+*arr setup running off of an old PC. Let me know if you need a hand
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Leave the battery in and you have a free UPS. Perhaps set it capped at 80% charge to increase its lifespan.
I think that’s preferable. I have resused my old gaming computer as a server since I stopped gaming for a while.
There are a lot of ways to go. My own isn’t particularly efficient, but it’s an old rack mount server. Everything is built like a tank. It’s robust as hell, and yet everything was well used and cheap. Probably not a good solution if you live somewhere with expensive power, but I don’t.
