Hello everyone.

Well, I’m here to ask for your insights and knowledge.

I have been self-hosting for almost a year already. Mainly proving things like Jellyfin, jellyseer and all the ARRs. All of this with a modest Raspberry Pi 4b using DietPi OS (which I think is great!)

Now, I want to move to the next stage, acquiring a more powerful machine.

What do you recommend for:

A) Mini PC. I want it to fast and with a huge storage (being able to increase it easily) B) SSD or HDD. Which ones. C) Operative System. I would like to stay on Linux.

Any other recommendations?

Finally, I have an adjusted budget, but pretend to save a bit more to have something nice :)

Thanks!

  • VoroxpeteEnglish
    5·
    9 months ago

    A really nice budget option is an old Lenovo or HP mini PC. These days they make thin client style machines that are absolutely tiny, use about as much power as a small laptop, and still have decent spec.

    Storage wise, there’s room to fit a 2.5" drive inside, and newer ones have NVME slots. You can buy them real cheap from a refurb supplier as businesses are offloading them all the time.

    In the same vein, a HP, Lenovo or Dell small form factor tower PC will up your power consumption a little, but give you room for a couple of 3.5" drives as well as an SSD. That’s enough to look at putting in a 12TB mirrored RAID for some serious storage. You’ve also got low profile PCI slots, so you can fit a GPU for faster re-encoding in Jellyfin.

    • mmhmm@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      check university and government surplus. EBay is rich with good models too

      • VoroxpeteEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        Good shout, yeah. I actually got mine for free because a friend who works IT in a different company snagged a few on the way to e-waste.