I’d like to buy an ex company PC to serve as home server, as an upgrade for my raspberry pi. It should run some selfhosted services like Frigate and Immich, and perhaps Jellyfin. I was thinking to buy an 9th gen Intel or later ex company PC. It should be energy efficient as well.
I tried looking at Trademe but you can’t filter on CPU generation. I could search on the exact Intel cpu number but that seems too restrictive. Pbtech is too expensive what I saw. I haven’t tried Marketplace but guess that’s the same. Some reddit post suggested Dell Optiplex, but no idea how their type numbering works.
Any tips?
Thanks for your detailed response! Think just an ex lease pc is sufficient for now, but will keep the ServeTheHome in mind.
That’s all these are, they’re just small - not sure which corps would use them, maybe contact centres as they can probably be mounted behind monitors. My 3 are the G2 so have an i5-6500T @ 2.5Ghz. They’ve got 2 RAM slots so I have 2x8GB sticks in mine (they almost always just come with 1x8GB, so is a nice easy upgrade). The only trick is to check what size HDD they’re going to come with, but even though they’re small they’re quite serviceable - fans, hdd & ram all easy to access.
There’s loads of them on TradeMe at the moment; and these are just the HP EliteDesk Mini’s that ServeTheHome video goes through a few different types, I think Dell & Lenovo both make very similar sized & spec machines:
https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/marketplace/computers/desktops/no-monitor/search?search_string=elitedesk mini&sort_order=priceasc
Hmm, now im searching these boxes im wondering if I want to expand my cluster from 3-6 nodes, though I don’t know if I have enough room in my rack :)
Here’s the Dell & Lenovo varieties:
https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/marketplace/computers/desktops/no-monitor/search?search_string=optiplex micro&sort_order=priceasc
https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/marketplace/computers/desktops/no-monitor/search?search_string=thinkcentre tiny&sort_order=priceasc
Thanks! So I’m new to multi nodes self hosting stuff, so far have used a Rpi for everything. With that configuration, can you run everything? Most of the things I want to run are dockerized, but eg pi hole had to be installed directly. Most important is better performance for Frigate (web cam monitoring) and immich (photo and video management).
There’d be a learning curve if you wanted to make a proper cluster; but you don’t really have to. The simplest way to augment what you’re already doing with the Rpi is to just add another computer as a server and put some of the docker containers on there instead of on the pi. You’d just have to know what IP is for which service, or just setup local DNS via pi-hole and point it to the right IP.
Yeah that’s probably the easiest, just set it up as second server. Thanks again.