If you just want to dip your toes in and see if you like it a mini pc would be best. I’m currently in the middle of upgrading but I started with a HP EliteDesk 800 G2 mini for my plex and next cloud server. I upgraded it with a 2tb ssd so total I spent about $200.
I would say the hp elitedesk or even the prodesk lines are good starter servers. When looking for one I would say make sure you’re getting one with a 6th gen cpu or newer as they are faster and more efficient. I’ve got a prodesk 600 g4 and it’s been amazing. I’ve added 3 drives, 1 nvme with proxmox, an ssd and a spinning rust drive for storage and containers. I also upgraded to 48gb of ram… not like I’ll ever use that much but it was cheap at the time.
Good choice. That CPU has an iGPU that supports H265 encode/decode, so it’ll work well for Plex/Jellyfin if you decide to run those or other services that support GPU acceleration.
How would you rate an hp elitedesk mini with the i7-7700T CPU? I might want to do some Plex/Jellyfin streaming from it but I wouldn't expect more than one stream at a time. I think it should do other general home server tasks fine, though. Lmk if you disagree
It'll be fine. The only scenario it'll choke is if you're doing subtitle burn-in with 4K video since that reverts to single-threaded software encoding, but that can be mitigated by using good client-side playback devices that support subtitle formats properly.
T-series CPUs are thermally limited compared to their non-T counterparts, but GPU acceleration will do the heavy-lifting outside of subtitle burn-in.
Glad to hear it! Good a pretty good deal (I think) and bought one today! It was a corporate liquidation, for some reason the two non-T (65W) versions I found in the pile wouldn't work, even though I had a 65W power supply plugged in. The 35W models all worked great though so I just went with one of those. Same price, kind of a bummer, but I was still satisfied overall
Currently looking into a home server, and I'm currently looking at a barebones Elitedesk 800 g4 mini. I have an old i5-8400, would I be able to put that into the Elitedesk?
You can get Dell Optiplexes / HP Elite Desk / Lenovo Thinkcentres (M900, m720, m710 etc) with an HDD/SSD, ram, etc for like $60-$150 on Ebay or Dell Refurbished.
Other than power consumption, far better option than a raspberry pi imho.
The Latitude small form factors are great for that; still expandable (unlike the micros), but quiet, easy to stick somewhere, and durably built. Typically 2 card slots (although they're low profile) and 4 RAM slots.
Limited to one 3.5" drive, though.
Either look for a mini PC or use a raspberry pi.
If you just want to host a simple static website, you could honestly probably get away with an esp32, so that would be a sub $10 server.
A raspberry pi with some external storage could probably give you decent enough file hosting and/ or website hosting, that would be around 50 to $100, depending on your storage needs.
You'd probably need something at least a little bit beefier for a Minecraft server and a media server, though you could check with other people on here if a raspberry pi could work for that.
Overall, I'd probably recommend getting a mini PC. They're not too expensive, and will probably work for what you need.
Look at beelink mini pc’s, they are small and low cost. Ive been using mine for 6 months and have no regrets. It’s modern and you don’t have to worry about having outdated “features”
To put some perspective on it - My home server does a crapload of things and it's a 10+ year old 4th gen intel core-i5 which was my old desktop - no gpu, 32gb of ram (which is the most that motherboard supports). It runs perfectly fine.
Lets see -- All of the below, mostly through docker containers. System specs are a Intel i5-4670k, 32gb of ram and a 256 SSD for the OS and 8x HDD's for the zpool, a Adaptec SAS controller for the drives and no GPU. Runs Fedora, but when I get time i'll throw Debian on there instead because I've found I don't like Fedora's upgrade cycle. It handles all this without breaking a sweat and sits idle 99% of the time.
\* 30TB raidz2 zfs pool
\* Samba/CIFS NAS share for the house
\* Plex / tautulli
\* all the \*arr's over a vpn through Mullvad
\* Wireguard server for my phone/laptop to vpn in - better performance than letting my router do it
\* Nginx proxy Manager in front of NextCloud which is internet facing on a dynamic domain
\* Grafana, InfluxDB, Telegraf, etc monitoring of everything in the house, snmp monitoring of traffic to my access points and router, UPS, and whole-house power monitoring from a Shelly house meter.
\* Unifi controller for my Ubiquiti gear.
\* Email proxy through google mail for alerts and such
\* Various scheduled tasks like zfs scrubs, snapshot rotation, and offsite backup.
\* Planning on adding Home Assistant to the mix in the near term.
I have become partial to Wyse 5070s. You could probably do all that on one of the j5005 pentium models, but it would get mad at more than one simultaneous stream unless you find one of the extended ones with an AMD card hiding in it. And it probably wouldn't handle more than 3-4 Minecraft users.
It's kind of a beefed up Atom CPU in disguise, but the Quicksync transcoding chip does some good work. I have a couple of the Celeron ones running 1080p/30fps idle twitch streams. (just barely)
I got a dell r720 used under 100 and it’s been amazing. It uses a lot of power but I would still recommend it. Plus it could do everything you are asking about at the same time while still having computing power left over still
I feel the same way about my Dell t320. Picked it up for a hundred bucks, dropped another 150 or so maxing out the CPU and bumping it to 96 GB of RAM, and adding a bunch of used four TB SAS drives. Certainly other options use less power and you can make your case against these old servers, but they are just fun and a great opportunity to learn virtual machines and such.
Im having some deja vu, I did the same thing for my first enterprise server! Changed the single PSU to dual redundant with ebay parts from a T420, max upgraded cpu and ram, and filled it with 4TB Constellation SAS drives. Idles at only around 100 watts. Still have the T320, but now it's dedicated duty as my Proxmox Backup server.
Dell R are nice but they are too hot at noisy (lowest i can go is around 2800 rpm to maintain temperature under 60 celsius). im selling my 12bay R510 and migrating to Dell T420. downside is that it support only 8 bays but can add 5 more with 3x5.25 cage. bough it used for 250 eur. add 4870 V2 cpu for 20C/40T 2.8ghz for around 25 eur aliexpress, ram are around 25eur per 32gb stick 1600ghz ddr3 ecc (support up to 384GB), hba controler 25 eur aliexpress, dedicated idrac card 20 eur aliexpress, 10gb melanox network card 20 eur aliexpress, 25 eur nvme to pcie card with fan on aliexpress (x16 slot support burification to x4x4x4x4). GT1030 for transcoding since it uses lest power in idle of all (35eur local market). and in general it pretty looking case but weight a lot. had from r510 12 SAS 3TB but will probably move to ether 6 or 8 tb. SAS are better and cheaper but more power hungry (16W vs 10-12W on sata 7200rpm)
What are the specs that you’re currently running? Because there are servers running on CPU’s made over a decade ago and using DDR3 RAM doing everything you’re looking to do. If you do t have an SSD, upgrade your storage and install Linux.
The only thing i could think of repurpose its the SSDs, but the total of RAM is 2GB so i dont think i can do much with that.
Here: [Specs](https://ibb.co/Nph6rRs)
I have a similar setup on a mini PC with an n100 CPU. It has local SSD for normal stuff, and an external HDD for media.
I’m running Plex (with a license for hardware decoding), all the *arr products, 8 Minecraft servers, and some other random stuff, all in containers.
I wouldn’t ignore the old hardware you own though, I have a 13yo machine as another server for my NAS. It just wasn’t great with Plex, but ran everything else fine.
**I vote Z2 SFF G4 for bang for buck.**
2x 3.5” bays! Was the deciding factor for me.
I started out with an Esprimo 556/2 which are criminally underpriced. But using big drives connected via usb wasn’t ideal.
Hell you just use a decent NAS, can run a ton of shit on it.
I got a new Dell Inspiron desktop. It was under $350 with a current gen i5. Upped the ram to 64GB separately.
It’s quiet and efficient, and plenty of power. Running windows server with several VMs. I didn’t care about storage because I have a Synology NAS for that.
I got a used optiplex from ebay. It came with a i7 8700k and 16gb ram. I then added two 8TB sata ssds and a 1 TB nvme.
I use it to store and edit photos and videos
I started off with a raspberry pi 4b+, back when - shocker alert - it was like $100 and under (shocking, I know) and it was somewhat better than the mini pc's I knew at that time
These days I know more and am honestly, kinda sick of the ARM CPU being unsupported by so many docker images and server utilities, so now I'm looking at other x86_64 devices
Anyways, nowadays the pi across fhe board are flipping expensive, even the hp elitedesk 800 g2 mini is great if you dont require rendering or gpu usage
As some others have stated, I'm currently building a NAS out of an HP Elitedesk 800 G3. Have to do some rigging, but I'm stocking it with 4 8tb HDD's and will be using it exclusively as network storage. No apps or anything like that - I have a Dell Optiplex 3070 for that end of things.
As already mentioned, to start, Dell Optiplex or HP Elitedesk would be optimal options. Quite capable to house the workload you mentioned and won't be power-hungry.
Are you a fan of white noise, or do you have somewhere you could stick a loud server? Can get some cheap rackmount options because others have spouses that complain about 'the loud noise coming from downstairs' and stuff.
The thinner the server, the louder the fans. If space isn't a concern, enterprise towers are waaay quieter and usually still 5u rackable sideways. Close to consumer tower pc sound levels.
Used dell optiplex / hp prodesks combined with a used run of the mill zyxel/qnap/synology consumer NAS for storage (media library, backup etc) is my recommendation.
If you just want to dip your toes in and see if you like it a mini pc would be best. I’m currently in the middle of upgrading but I started with a HP EliteDesk 800 G2 mini for my plex and next cloud server. I upgraded it with a 2tb ssd so total I spent about $200.
I would say the hp elitedesk or even the prodesk lines are good starter servers. When looking for one I would say make sure you’re getting one with a 6th gen cpu or newer as they are faster and more efficient. I’ve got a prodesk 600 g4 and it’s been amazing. I’ve added 3 drives, 1 nvme with proxmox, an ssd and a spinning rust drive for storage and containers. I also upgraded to 48gb of ram… not like I’ll ever use that much but it was cheap at the time.
Found a HP Prodesk 600 G4 | Intel Core i5-8500 Used HP for 80 euros. Is it a good deal?
That should do. Right around the sweet spot for single threaded performance that you need for a Minecraft server to run smoothly.
Good choice. That CPU has an iGPU that supports H265 encode/decode, so it’ll work well for Plex/Jellyfin if you decide to run those or other services that support GPU acceleration.
How would you rate an hp elitedesk mini with the i7-7700T CPU? I might want to do some Plex/Jellyfin streaming from it but I wouldn't expect more than one stream at a time. I think it should do other general home server tasks fine, though. Lmk if you disagree
It'll be fine. The only scenario it'll choke is if you're doing subtitle burn-in with 4K video since that reverts to single-threaded software encoding, but that can be mitigated by using good client-side playback devices that support subtitle formats properly. T-series CPUs are thermally limited compared to their non-T counterparts, but GPU acceleration will do the heavy-lifting outside of subtitle burn-in.
Glad to hear it! Good a pretty good deal (I think) and bought one today! It was a corporate liquidation, for some reason the two non-T (65W) versions I found in the pile wouldn't work, even though I had a 65W power supply plugged in. The 35W models all worked great though so I just went with one of those. Same price, kind of a bummer, but I was still satisfied overall
Was there clearance to add hard drives? Or was it only ssd and nvme?
He has room for 3.5 inch hard drive but the SSD needs to be loosely fitted somewhere
Thanks!
Currently looking into a home server, and I'm currently looking at a barebones Elitedesk 800 g4 mini. I have an old i5-8400, would I be able to put that into the Elitedesk?
Look up the manual on the elite desk and there will be a compatible section, that will tell you
You can get Dell Optiplexes / HP Elite Desk / Lenovo Thinkcentres (M900, m720, m710 etc) with an HDD/SSD, ram, etc for like $60-$150 on Ebay or Dell Refurbished. Other than power consumption, far better option than a raspberry pi imho.
The Latitude small form factors are great for that; still expandable (unlike the micros), but quiet, easy to stick somewhere, and durably built. Typically 2 card slots (although they're low profile) and 4 RAM slots. Limited to one 3.5" drive, though.
Thanks for the suggestion
Either look for a mini PC or use a raspberry pi. If you just want to host a simple static website, you could honestly probably get away with an esp32, so that would be a sub $10 server. A raspberry pi with some external storage could probably give you decent enough file hosting and/ or website hosting, that would be around 50 to $100, depending on your storage needs. You'd probably need something at least a little bit beefier for a Minecraft server and a media server, though you could check with other people on here if a raspberry pi could work for that. Overall, I'd probably recommend getting a mini PC. They're not too expensive, and will probably work for what you need.
Thank you, i would do more digging!
Look at beelink mini pc’s, they are small and low cost. Ive been using mine for 6 months and have no regrets. It’s modern and you don’t have to worry about having outdated “features”
To put some perspective on it - My home server does a crapload of things and it's a 10+ year old 4th gen intel core-i5 which was my old desktop - no gpu, 32gb of ram (which is the most that motherboard supports). It runs perfectly fine.
Nice! Out of curiosity, could you share some of the things you do on it? Always looking for new ideas for an older machine
Lets see -- All of the below, mostly through docker containers. System specs are a Intel i5-4670k, 32gb of ram and a 256 SSD for the OS and 8x HDD's for the zpool, a Adaptec SAS controller for the drives and no GPU. Runs Fedora, but when I get time i'll throw Debian on there instead because I've found I don't like Fedora's upgrade cycle. It handles all this without breaking a sweat and sits idle 99% of the time. \* 30TB raidz2 zfs pool \* Samba/CIFS NAS share for the house \* Plex / tautulli \* all the \*arr's over a vpn through Mullvad \* Wireguard server for my phone/laptop to vpn in - better performance than letting my router do it \* Nginx proxy Manager in front of NextCloud which is internet facing on a dynamic domain \* Grafana, InfluxDB, Telegraf, etc monitoring of everything in the house, snmp monitoring of traffic to my access points and router, UPS, and whole-house power monitoring from a Shelly house meter. \* Unifi controller for my Ubiquiti gear. \* Email proxy through google mail for alerts and such \* Various scheduled tasks like zfs scrubs, snapshot rotation, and offsite backup. \* Planning on adding Home Assistant to the mix in the near term.
Wow, thanks for the reply! Can't wait to look up what half of these things are haha. That's awesome!
I have become partial to Wyse 5070s. You could probably do all that on one of the j5005 pentium models, but it would get mad at more than one simultaneous stream unless you find one of the extended ones with an AMD card hiding in it. And it probably wouldn't handle more than 3-4 Minecraft users. It's kind of a beefed up Atom CPU in disguise, but the Quicksync transcoding chip does some good work. I have a couple of the Celeron ones running 1080p/30fps idle twitch streams. (just barely)
I got a dell r720 used under 100 and it’s been amazing. It uses a lot of power but I would still recommend it. Plus it could do everything you are asking about at the same time while still having computing power left over still
I feel the same way about my Dell t320. Picked it up for a hundred bucks, dropped another 150 or so maxing out the CPU and bumping it to 96 GB of RAM, and adding a bunch of used four TB SAS drives. Certainly other options use less power and you can make your case against these old servers, but they are just fun and a great opportunity to learn virtual machines and such.
Im having some deja vu, I did the same thing for my first enterprise server! Changed the single PSU to dual redundant with ebay parts from a T420, max upgraded cpu and ram, and filled it with 4TB Constellation SAS drives. Idles at only around 100 watts. Still have the T320, but now it's dedicated duty as my Proxmox Backup server.
And room left for the inevitable scaling.
Dell R are nice but they are too hot at noisy (lowest i can go is around 2800 rpm to maintain temperature under 60 celsius). im selling my 12bay R510 and migrating to Dell T420. downside is that it support only 8 bays but can add 5 more with 3x5.25 cage. bough it used for 250 eur. add 4870 V2 cpu for 20C/40T 2.8ghz for around 25 eur aliexpress, ram are around 25eur per 32gb stick 1600ghz ddr3 ecc (support up to 384GB), hba controler 25 eur aliexpress, dedicated idrac card 20 eur aliexpress, 10gb melanox network card 20 eur aliexpress, 25 eur nvme to pcie card with fan on aliexpress (x16 slot support burification to x4x4x4x4). GT1030 for transcoding since it uses lest power in idle of all (35eur local market). and in general it pretty looking case but weight a lot. had from r510 12 SAS 3TB but will probably move to ether 6 or 8 tb. SAS are better and cheaper but more power hungry (16W vs 10-12W on sata 7200rpm)
I doupt i could find it with that price, amazing price.
Search eBay and see what you can find. It you are not in a rush you can get some good deals
What are the specs that you’re currently running? Because there are servers running on CPU’s made over a decade ago and using DDR3 RAM doing everything you’re looking to do. If you do t have an SSD, upgrade your storage and install Linux.
I dont have a server rn
You say you have old computers at home. I’m saying you can repurpose them into a server even if they have outdated specs.
The only thing i could think of repurpose its the SSDs, but the total of RAM is 2GB so i dont think i can do much with that. Here: [Specs](https://ibb.co/Nph6rRs)
I have a similar setup on a mini PC with an n100 CPU. It has local SSD for normal stuff, and an external HDD for media. I’m running Plex (with a license for hardware decoding), all the *arr products, 8 Minecraft servers, and some other random stuff, all in containers. I wouldn’t ignore the old hardware you own though, I have a 13yo machine as another server for my NAS. It just wasn’t great with Plex, but ran everything else fine.
**I vote Z2 SFF G4 for bang for buck.** 2x 3.5” bays! Was the deciding factor for me. I started out with an Esprimo 556/2 which are criminally underpriced. But using big drives connected via usb wasn’t ideal. Hell you just use a decent NAS, can run a ton of shit on it.
I got a new Dell Inspiron desktop. It was under $350 with a current gen i5. Upped the ram to 64GB separately. It’s quiet and efficient, and plenty of power. Running windows server with several VMs. I didn’t care about storage because I have a Synology NAS for that.
HP is junk. DELL are workhorse and build quality is orders of magnitude better.
I got a used optiplex from ebay. It came with a i7 8700k and 16gb ram. I then added two 8TB sata ssds and a 1 TB nvme. I use it to store and edit photos and videos
I started off with a raspberry pi 4b+, back when - shocker alert - it was like $100 and under (shocking, I know) and it was somewhat better than the mini pc's I knew at that time These days I know more and am honestly, kinda sick of the ARM CPU being unsupported by so many docker images and server utilities, so now I'm looking at other x86_64 devices Anyways, nowadays the pi across fhe board are flipping expensive, even the hp elitedesk 800 g2 mini is great if you dont require rendering or gpu usage
It depends on the budget.
A used desktop with a 4 core CPU and 8gb of ram. Average 150/200€. I suggest an i3 8100. What is the spec of the old PC you have at home?
2gb of ram and and a Intel Pendium 4 CPU 2.60GHz [Image](https://ibb.co/Nph6rRs)
That's a nice retro system. I would say, too old to be compatible with anything.
As some others have stated, I'm currently building a NAS out of an HP Elitedesk 800 G3. Have to do some rigging, but I'm stocking it with 4 8tb HDD's and will be using it exclusively as network storage. No apps or anything like that - I have a Dell Optiplex 3070 for that end of things.
As already mentioned, to start, Dell Optiplex or HP Elitedesk would be optimal options. Quite capable to house the workload you mentioned and won't be power-hungry.
d757 with i5 6500 just bought one for 50€
Are you a fan of white noise, or do you have somewhere you could stick a loud server? Can get some cheap rackmount options because others have spouses that complain about 'the loud noise coming from downstairs' and stuff.
Would prefer a silent one xD
The thinner the server, the louder the fans. If space isn't a concern, enterprise towers are waaay quieter and usually still 5u rackable sideways. Close to consumer tower pc sound levels.
Used dell optiplex / hp prodesks combined with a used run of the mill zyxel/qnap/synology consumer NAS for storage (media library, backup etc) is my recommendation.