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