this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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Selfhosted

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"Recommended System Requirements" for buying a used PC for selfhosting (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 2 days ago by sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I'm ready to graduate from my Raspberry Pi era of selfhosting and buy hardware specifically for use as a server.

I've been recommended in the past to look for used Lenovo Thinkstations and/or Dell Optiplex, but it has been so many years since I've shopped for a computer, I don't know what kind of specs to look for. What are the types of specs I should look for to get the best value for money?

I'm hoping to spend around $300-400, get something that can be upgraded in the future to last 10+ years, and do the following things:

  • YUNoHost / reverse proxy
  • Nextcloud with a custom domain for email addresses, cloud drive, photos
  • Music Streaming with something like Navidrome
  • Serve static websites
  • pi-Hole
  • Maybe pi-VPN

And someday maybe:

  • Host game servers like minecraft
  • Jellyfin for videos
  • Kodi and output to TV?

So far based on my selfhosted journey, I expect to want the following:

  • Room for 3+ Hard Drives
  • External UPS (probably will go with the cheap APC at Microcenter that's always on sale).
  • Solid Power Supply / Cooling
  • probably 1000 gigabit Networking (?)

The types of questions I have for Thinkstations / Optiplex:

  • How is the Power Supply / Cooling?
  • Processor? Do I need i5? i7? Generations? AMD? Clock Speed? I'm completely lost here.
  • How much RAM do I need?
  • Do I need a discrete graphics card? Can Thinkstations / Optiplex have a graphics card added to them later?
  • Anything else I'm missing?

Thanks!

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[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh, I hear ya on the space issue - there's almost no space in this SFF, but I like it's form factor so I'm willing to compromise.

Anymore I don't find RAID very useful, except for mirroring a drive. As I say this, I do have a NAS with 5 drives, but it's used as one of my replicators as it's too slow for anything else. I did run Proxmox with RAID for a while, that was pretty cool, I just don't need all it's capability.

These days I can get a large enough single drive for a box - I considered getting a 12TB but the price on the 8 was hard to beat and I won't be filling it anytime soon.

[–] 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 1 points 1 day ago

transitioning away from raid but I do love zfs for flexibility. A lot of the data I have is important for someone or somebody, so zfs and a decent backup solution is in use just to make sure. I went bananas and picked up a used Supermicro 4-node server that takes dual E5 Zeons (V1 or V2) with 2xE5-2620s and 49 gig ram in each node for £80 (I'm in the UK). Plenty of power and next is to upgrade the cpus to slightly better cpus to reduce power as it currently uses 2 nodes and I am pulling around 300 watts most of the time. Backup solution is an old Ryzen 3200G with 32 gig ram that runs truenas and has 5x3tb spinny drives in it