I am thinking about buying a home server for a wide range of things. I found some cheap old computers on amazon for around 80-90€. Is it worth it to upgrade them with another stick of ram or a larger SSD? 2 8gb RAM sticks are only around 15€, so that would be 100 in total. But my question is, is it worth it, or is the CPU the limiting factor. Some of them have one from the pentium series. Also, is 15€ for 2x8gb DDR4 RAM normal (not too cheap)? Maybe you have other ideas for a cheap home server. In my case I don’t think a 90€ raspberry pi is worth it
OP, as others have said, power is a big issue.
I have two boxes at home, a 10 year old desktop, and a 4 year old SFF (small form factor). The SFF idles at about 12 watts, with 3 drives in it (2.5", RAID 5). The desktop idles at 120w with 2 drives in it. With more drives it idles at 200w.
I use the desktop as a duplicate of the SFF, but it only runs for 1 hour overnight for sync to occur (I also have cloud backup via storj.io).
The desktop ran with 2 drives for years, my electricity cost was about $1 per day. That pretty much doubles with the new multi drive setup (which is why it only runs once a day).
Power efficiency is a real concern, so paying for a newer computer is likely worth it. My long term plan is to build a new system periodically, both for power but also because hardware eventually dies.