Honestly, those are the most interesting builds to me. As an American, I’m waiting for tariffs to die before buying stuff of AliExpress, but one can hope.
I have built and maintained all manner of home servers using inexpensive used hardware. Any PC or old laptop can do this stuff. Unless you’re doing something crazy on them, I’ve not encountered a lot of situations that I could not sort out. Usually throwing some more memory and storage into them solves most issues.
I ran a used desktop machine with an i3 processor (retired school system) for YEARS as my NAS with zero issues beyond adding a little cooling. Did the same with a firewall, worked for ages with no issues.
Getting a mini pc is nice if you are putting it in your living room, but there are still many choices for small form factor devices. Not quite as small, but still pretty small. Lots of them were used as POS terminals at stores. Wipe 'em, reload and start fresh.
That’s pretty much the self-made home media system I’ve upgraded to some months ago, only mine has an N100 CPU (which is nicer from a power consumption point of view for an always on system since its TDP is 15W).
It’s wired to my TV, running Kodi on the foreground, runs qBittrorrent on the background over an always on VPN and serves as my home NAS.
From Aliexpress I got a wireless remote that let’s me control Kodi as if it was a TV box, so from my sofa I handle it as a TV box whilst from my PC I can ssh to it and to any computer kind of management.
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This seems like it could be a fun project. Mind making a post about the build sometime?
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Honestly, those are the most interesting builds to me. As an American, I’m waiting for tariffs to die before buying stuff of AliExpress, but one can hope.
I have built and maintained all manner of home servers using inexpensive used hardware. Any PC or old laptop can do this stuff. Unless you’re doing something crazy on them, I’ve not encountered a lot of situations that I could not sort out. Usually throwing some more memory and storage into them solves most issues.
I ran a used desktop machine with an i3 processor (retired school system) for YEARS as my NAS with zero issues beyond adding a little cooling. Did the same with a firewall, worked for ages with no issues.
Getting a mini pc is nice if you are putting it in your living room, but there are still many choices for small form factor devices. Not quite as small, but still pretty small. Lots of them were used as POS terminals at stores. Wipe 'em, reload and start fresh.
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That’s pretty much the self-made home media system I’ve upgraded to some months ago, only mine has an N100 CPU (which is nicer from a power consumption point of view for an always on system since its TDP is 15W).
It’s wired to my TV, running Kodi on the foreground, runs qBittrorrent on the background over an always on VPN and serves as my home NAS.
From Aliexpress I got a wireless remote that let’s me control Kodi as if it was a TV box, so from my sofa I handle it as a TV box whilst from my PC I can ssh to it and to any computer kind of management.
Probably one of my best purchases ever.
Depending on how much space you want the HDDs will probablybe the biggest cost