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.

  • BT_7274@lemmy.worldEnglish
    34·
    19 hours ago

    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.

    • NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.comEnglish
      6·
      19 hours ago

      +1 on Mac mini as well. I just checked OfferUp in my area and M1-M5 are insanely expensive ($500+, M1 coming out about 6 years ago) but really good machines especially for their size and decent on power consumption too.

      But downside of a M series is either you run macOS or Asahi Linux and nothing else yet.

      So go for the Intel Mac Minis which are much cheaper and can run nearly any Linux distro with little to no issues as you would on a Windows PC. I’m seeing $50 range in my area as well. Older are good because RAM can be upgraded on some of them, but not all. Would be wise to do research on whichever seems right.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        But downside of a M series is either you run macOS or Asahi Linux and nothing else yet.

        I’m OOTL; what is it about Apple Silicon Macs that apparently make them such trouble to support? If one distro can manage it, what’s stopping that code from being upstreamed to the mainline kernel etc.?

        • NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.comEnglish
          1·
          38 minutes ago

          Mainly that it’s a custom ARM processor, not your standard x86 architecture like the Intel processors were that were also available in non-Apple hardware.

          macOS runs extremely well on it and I think there’s not much demand for a custom Linux distro because of that. Plus the fact that your favorite distro would have yet another architecture they would have to support by adding this in. Asahi is an exception because the team spent time doing it but I haven’t heard of any others getting Linux distros created for it yet. As time goes on and the prices decrease, we’ll start to see more teams dedicating time to creating Linux distros that support it.

      • lazylemons@lemmy.todayEnglish
        4·
        18 hours ago

        A word of warning on Linux on Mac though. Oftentimes there can be weird quirks with power management and suspend/hibernate. For a server though I guess that point is moot.