Selfhosted

The sub-$300 is increasingly dying because of the RAM prices, but anything with a N100 or N150 should be enough for your usage case.

Stop ordering from Amazon

It won’t be on Amazon, but I found a ton of older generation Mac minis available on Craigslist in my area. I picked one up for $50 and installed Ubuntu server. Thing’s been running like a champ for 2 years.

Edit: should have fully read your post. No idea about installing truenas on it. I’d assume most would be single ssd machines.

Just about any of the Intel N series minipcs are often suggested for just Jellyfin. I haven't looked at them too much yet.

Ask your local university facilities department about their overstock policy. The university of Arizona literally has a warehouse where you can peruse their old computers and furniture and buy at Craigslist prices.

A mini PC could certainly work! If you're willing to go ebay, I'd recommend any of these Lenovo Thinkcentre SFF PCs:

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thinkcentre-thinkstation-tiny-project-tinyminimicro-reference-thread.34925/

1-2x m.2 slots, 1x 2.5" slot, and some can accommodate a half-height PCI-E card in place of the 2.5" slot. Presumably, you'd want to go Intel for QSV

Thinkcentre Tiny, Dell Optiplex Micro, or HP ProDesk Mini. Prices have gone up the last few months but they’re still a solid value. Most sellers ship pretty quick these days.

Any used PC or laptop that can run Linux.

Ask a local ISP like us. We store our old servers and send them to be recycled annually. If I had an enthusiast walk up to our offices asking for a donation, we wouldn't hesitate. Can't speak for competitors, but it's worth a shot.

I use Intel NUCs off eBay for this kind of stuff. A few years ago you could get one for ~$200 on eBay.

University surplus. I work for a university and we get rid of stuff all tfe time that is still very useful.

There are companies selling off PCs that are "too small" for Win11, really cheap. More than sufficient for a NAS. You might even get a bunch of them, chose the best mainboard/case/PSU set, put the others in storage, and get all the RAM and HDD in one box.

Wondering what is a good sub $300 computer I can order that will run Jellyfin, Immich, and a few light services off of?

A lot more options than you think. The Tiny/Mini/Micro PCs are fantastic for what they are, even one running a 7th gen Intel CPU is more than plenty.

If you want a NAS on the cheap my preference is just get any cheap "normal" PC, a case with a good amount of HDD bays. Move the drives into the PC, and you have all the expand ability you could dream of. You can find plenty of DDR4 machines for cheap now. Then as ram prices come down you can go up to 128gb of ram as long as your board has 4 slots.

Anything on craigslist/FB marketplace will work.

Find something on craigslist or local pickup on ebay, check government/police surplus, or do some freecycling. At least in my area a lot of people leave their e-waste computers at Best Buy, often in the doorway, nobody cares if you come and pick them up. Even if they're broken (and they're often perfectly functional and sometimes surprisingly powerful) it likely only takes a few before you've got some functional combination of parts.

It's likely not as much of a picker's heaven anymore since I imagine the huge wave of windows-10-obsolete computers being thrown away for no reason has probably mostly subsided, but there is so much old and perfectly functional stuff out there it's really unjustifiable to be buying something new especially at today's modern prices.

Where you happy with the Lenovo thinkcentre? You can often find replacement motherboards for these. It will be cheaper than any of the alternatives here.

So a trick for the double drives is to pop in a low profile usb drive and install the os on that. Then you can use the ssd/hdd for other things.

The key here is old hardware. I built a TrueNAS box out of an old Dell Optiplex 990. I got it from a friend for free but you can find one online for well under $200. Later you can upgrade the box bit-by-bit if you care to. I upgraded the case, motherboard, cooler, and power supply over time. It’s been a capable NAS for several years even though it’s using a 2nd gen Intel core i3.

Set aside some for surge protection/UPS

Dell optiplex

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

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A refurbished Dell optiplex has been my move. Hasn't failed me yet.

Not much right now due to LLM training hogging all of the memory across the industry. Best bet is lightly used.