this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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What Is A Good Sub $300 Computer I Can Use For A Server? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 6 days ago by qwestjest78@lemmy.ca to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I have a refurbished Lenovo Thinkcentre that I was running Truenas off of. Everything was working great, but it got hit with a power surge and after lots of trouble shooting it appears the motherboard is fried and I don't trust my ability to soder and fix it.

No now I need to upgrade my setup. Wondering what is a good sub $300 computer I can order that will run Jellyfin, Immich, and a few light services off of? With Truenas you seem to need two SSDs. One to boot and one to run apps, so it seems like a mini PC will not work.

I have a seperate HDD drive bay with a few hdd's in it full of shows and picture. Just need a PC to run my services.

I would prefer something I can order off Amazon or can be shipped quickly so I can get back up and running again.

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[–] BenevolentOne@infosec.pub 2 points 5 days ago (10 children)

I usually pick up the cheapest non-chromebook laptop I can find and put Linux on it.

There are a couple key advantages here:

  1. It's very cheap.
  2. Battery Backup included.
  3. Monitor and keyboard included.
  4. Power efficient by design.
  5. Available all the time from any vendor.
  6. You can take it with you, update your server on the couch and slap it back on the rack.
  7. Virtually any configuration you want in candy colors.
  8. Did I mention these are very cheap?

It can be a bit tricky to find one with Ethernet and two SSDs is kinda exotic (especially because you could get two whole laptops for the cost of some NAS enclosures) but there are over 3000 different models under $300 on Amazon, I'm sure you can find something good.

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[–] FudgyMcTubbs@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

I use a nucbox mini pc and two usb ext hdds to run a jellyfin server and a samba file server. Works great. Im using Lubuntu -- i dont exactly recommend it, but it works fine enough. Any lite Linux distro would probably work great. Here's a picture of my janky "server rack" setup:

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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

Fewer Letters More Letters
AP WiFi Access Point
NAS Network-Attached Storage
NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
PSU Power Supply Unit
RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SBC Single-Board Computer
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

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

[Thread #266 for this comm, first seen 1st May 2026, 03:00] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] verstra@programming.dev 1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

For a server like this 4GB of DDR4 is enough. And that is cheap still.

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 days ago

Not with TrueNAS, ZFS is a RAM hog. They suggest 8gb minimum, and you really don't want the minimum AND adding more stuff on top. That said 16gb isn't too painful.

[–] irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 6 days ago

Possibly, but it's going to have issues. Immich can run on 4GB if you disable machine learning features for image recognition and such. And Jellyfin can run on a minimal system with 4GB if you have a graphics card, but with integrated graphics likely to be in a sub-$300 system the recommend 8GB. And graphics cards are still expensive even after the crypto craze has settled because LLMs benefit but also because of the artificial memory shortages they've created. Running both might work if you set a lot of virtual memory and never have them operating at the same time so it's not swapping constantly. And that's not leaving room for the other stuff. I'd say you could squeak by with 16GB, but that's going to be most of the budget even for low-end, off brand sticks that are available right now.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 days ago

Openmediavault might be an option also, if the drive thing is a problem with TrueNAS

[–] AnotherMadHatter@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

Hit up local government auctions. Sometimes they sell 2-4 computers in a lot, sometimes they sell 157. I got 4 Lenovo mini computers for $34 each in an auction a while back. They only needed hard drives.

[–] Mongostein@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 days ago

Any post-2015 laptop would work. Look around in your local recycling bins :D

[–] prettybunnys@piefed.social 1 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Would a pi5 work?

[–] addie@feddit.uk 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

They're quite versatile computers for general purposes, but their i/o performance is dreadful. Mine all max out at about ten megabytes per second. That will not do, for server purposes.

Fortunately, there's businesses all over that are chucking out all their old mini PCs since they won't run Win11. I got an extremely decent one for £20 and it's my new home server. Absolutely storms it, while just sipping at electricity.

[–] prettybunnys@piefed.social 3 points 6 days ago

I served 4k content with plex off a 4, while running pihole on it.

They say they have a drive enclosure, so if that’s network attached they may be good.

[–] verstra@programming.dev 1 points 6 days ago

It would, but it does not have SATA. You can find much cheaper computers that do have it

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[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago

I do what you are asking about literally with a 2014 Thinkpad. The only thing is I don't use any "fancy" features. For instance, with Jellyfin I ensure that the data is in a commonly supported format to ensure there is no transcoding or remuxing performed by the server itself.

So, just find any computer made in the last 7 years, slap Linux on it, and I'm sure you'll be fine.

[–] CannedYeet@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Woot.com has lots of refurbs around that price.

It's part of Amazon so you can use your Prime shipping.

[–] nforminvasion@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

You actually can use a minipc. Minisforum has their NAB series and those have a slot in their internals for an SSD and they have an NVME slot in the motherboard. I found a NAB9 with an NVME, SSD, and 16GB of ram for around $310. So I would look for used NAB6s (cheaper than NAB9) on EBay. You should find some for under 300 with the Data SSD and NVME.

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