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.
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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Openmediavault might be an option also, if the drive thing is a problem with TrueNAS
Would a pi5 work?
It would, but it does not have SATA. You can find much cheaper computers that do have it
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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.
You you could do most of that with a raspberry pi5, 8GB. With a whole kit, you can get it for under $250. I'm running 3 at my place: 1 for media (servarr stack, JF, Navidrome, Invidious), 1 for the Fediverse (Mastodon, Piefed, Peertube, WordPress), and 1 for anything else.
Edit: I also missed the part about truenas, but you can still run containers on any other OS just fine.
Why tho?
For $250 you can build a pretty solid system with lots of storage
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You can go far below $300 with very little practical performance compromise, but I wouldn't even look on Amazon with memory prices being what they are lately. Get an old DDR3 era Optiplex desktop on eBay, throw a $25 Quadro P400 in it for transcoding, and transfer your existing SSDs over. Tons of eBay listings have 2-4 day shipping. With DDR3 you can easily get 16GB of RAM for like $30 if it doesn't have enough already. Avoiding DDR4/DDR5 will save a ton of money so it's essential to buy used.
The SSDs and hard drives for the array are by far the most expensive part. I've been using an underclocked and undervolted Ryzen 1700 in my server for 6 years now and have zero complaints around CPU performance. I did eventually need more than 16GB of RAM last year, but the only outright failures I've had are on the various component's fans.
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:
My last build and current have been a Thinkstation and a z series workstation, both used from ex-gov auctions, were decently priced, will run everything you wanna throw at them.
They do come at the cost of increased power draw, but since I've put in solar I'm not worried about that.
Not much right now due to LLM training hogging all of the memory across the industry. Best bet is lightly used.
For a server like this 4GB of DDR4 is enough. And that is cheap still.
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.
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.
I would pickup a old workstation of of a site like eBay. Last time I was shopping around they were pretty cheap but that was pretty insanity pricing
Yep. Assuming you're in the US, searching eBay for "Dell optiplex" is the way to go.
Those are mostly used by companies that upgrade their entire fleet in one go so they sell the old ones for cheap in great condition.
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.
Any post-2015 laptop would work. Look around in your local recycling bins :D
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.
Woot.com has lots of refurbs around that price.
It's part of Amazon so you can use your Prime shipping.
it got hit with a power surge and after lots of trouble shooting it appears the motherboard is fried
I am truly sorry for your misfortune. I feel a bit bumed right now. Others with better knowledge than I have gave suggestions. That just slapped me in the face, because I know how I certainly would feel.