[notesinthefield]

I find myself a bit overwhelmed with hardware options during recent explorations. Seemingly everything can handle what I want a local copy of my Bandcamp archive to stream via jellyfin. Good times we’re in but even having good sysadmin skills, I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy.

[devonhk]

> I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy.

I’ll bite. You can save a lot of money by buying used hardware. I recommend looking for old Dell OptiPlex towers on Facebook Marketplace or from local used computer stores. Lenovo ThinkCentres (e.g., m700 tiny) are also a great option if you prefer something with a smaller form factor.

I’d recommend disregarding advice from non-technical folks recommending brand new, expensive hardware, because it’s usually overkill.

[SchemaLoad]

I spent so long trying to make Raspberry Pis work but they just kind of suck and everything is harder on them. I only just discovered that there are an infinite supply of these micro desktops second hand from offices/government. I was able to pick up a 9th gen intel with 16gb ram for less than the cost of a Pi 5, and it's massively more powerful.

[lucb1e]

What's the power consumption on those?

I'm not familiar with Dell product names specifically but 'tower' sounds like it'll sit there burning 200W idle. Old laptops (sliding out the battery) is what I've been opting for, which use barely anything more than the router it sits next to. Especially if you just want to serve static files as GP seems to be looking for, an old smartphone will be enough but there you can't remove the battery (since it won't run off of just the charger)

[notesinthefield]

I forgot all about these after I stopped doing desktop support, thanks!

[rr808]

Get started a corporate surplus mini pc on ebay. They super cheap - search for micro pc - if you get a recent CPU from Dell or Lenovo should be under $200, you can install Fedora or other Linux distribution. Ask Claude for everything else.

[lucb1e]

That's twice what I'd spend on a first server when you're still figuring out what you need!

My first "server" was a 65€ second-hand laptop including shipping iirc, in ~2010 euros so say maybe 100€ now when taking inflation into account. I used that for a number of years and had a good idea of what I wanted from my next setup (which wasn't much heavier, but a little newer cpu wasn't amiss after 3 years). Don't think one needs to even go so far as 200$ for a "local Bandcamp archive" (static file storage) and serving that via some streaming webserver

Jellyfin docs do mention "Not having a GPU is NOT recommended for Jellyfin, as video transcoding on the CPU is very performance demanding" but that's for on-the-fly video transcoding. If you transcode your videos to the desired format(s) upon import, or don't have any videos at all yet as in GP's case, it doesn't matter if the hardware is 20x slower. Worst case, you just watch that movie in source material quality: on a LAN you won't have network speed bottlenecks anyway, and transcoding on GPU is much more expensive (purchase + ongoing power costs) than the gigabit ethernet that you can already find by default on every laptop and router