I have never homelabbed, and this is going to be my first experience. I want to set up a home server. My current goals are to set up a gallery using Immich, an ad blocker/DNS using Pi-hole, and a cloud service.

I want you to suggest what second-hand PC or laptop I should get. I researched a bit and found out that a PC is better because of 24/7 reliability, better cooling, no risk of laptop battery swelling, easy RAM and storage expandability, and low idle power consumption.

What I think the specs should be for me is 12 GB RAM and 256 GB storage. And my budget is 10k INR.

I want to hear your thoughts. Thank you! :)

  • Eldritch@piefed.worldEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    I’m not sure where AMD started allowing PCI and USB VM hardware pass through. But Intel 7xxx and up allow for it. Which really opens up what you can do. I have a tiny HP business unit with a 7th gen i5, 8GB RAM, and 256GB nvme sans psu. I picked up for 60 bucks on eBay plus shipping and taxes. PSU was about 16 dollars.

    Proxmox as a hypervisor, patching my zwave and ZigBee USB dongle through to HA. HA running on 2 core and 4GB. I passed the rest of the CPU, RAM, SSD, mouse, keyboard and display off to Haiku. For a nice graphical local admin console. I could easily split off more from haiku and get a 3rd setup running under proxmox. As haiku doesn’t necessarily need more than half a GB of RAM and 20 to 30 GB of disk space and 1 core really.