Home server office pc

[u/Far_Spite_4682]

I’m looking to build a home server and would appreciate some advice on what hardware to go for.

Budget: £200–250, ideally as cheap as possible without sacrificing too much performance. I’m happy to buy used parts or a refurbished office PC.

What I’m looking for:

• At least 2 × 3.5-inch HDD bays, preferably with room to expand in the future.
• A relatively modern motherboard and chipset.
• 16–32GB DDR4 RAM, ideally with the option to upgrade to 32GB or more.
• A decent CPU that offers good performance without excessive power consumption.
• Enough SATA ports for multiple HDDs and ideally an M.2 slot for an SSD.

What I want to run:

• Plex media server, ideally with hardware transcoding.
• NAS for file storage.
• Minecraft server for a small number of players, potentially modded.
• Pi-hole and possibly other self-hosted services in the future.

I’m based in the UK, so recommendations for used PCs, eBay bargains, or custom builds using second-hand components would be particularly helpful.

[u/tom-mart]

I'm afraid you may be 2 years late with that budget. Today £200 will get you a miniPC with 16gb RAM and some storage, not much more than that. Saying that, it would most likely be enough for what you need.

[u/GrimAugust → u/tom-mart]

My 16GB ram stick cost £200....

Anyhow... sometimes you can find some weird ebay listings for cheap. Probably it's going to be EoL equipment, good enough to run Linux. You also need at least software RAID if you want NAS, second hand HDDs are not reliable and you might lose all your data

[u/bearert0ken → u/tom-mart]

You’d be surprised. Facebook Marketplace is a wonder.. but nowadays 16-32 GB RAM is unrealistic at the price..

[u/speaksoftly_bigstick]

For that price range, look on eBay for dell mt series. Like a 5060 MT.

Will be an older gen i5/i7 and minimal components most likely, but will get you where you want.

Intel igpus work fantastically for any media transcoding via plex / Emby / jellyfin.

Also pihole is great, ran it for years... But if you're savvy enough and want to test it, would recommend technitum instead.

Does all the things pihole does, but has much more ability and granularity to it natively and from the UI.

[u/Silent_Title5109]

You'll be looking for used parts with that budget. 16GB ddr4 is about £100 if shopping for new.

A used gaming pc or office box is pretty much what you're looking for at that price point. Check with your friends, family, at work if anybody is looking for a new home for old hardware until prices get out of the "are you shitting me right now?" range.

[u/the_flopsie]

personally I'd go for something like this from this seller:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/278427942474?itmmeta=01M4NRAD14MHQ4PJ5VAYMYGNCA&hash=item40d3993e4a:g:alcAAOSwLShk-vqu

And grab yourself some ddr4 as you go along. Drives can be picked up for around £40 from them as well.

I got my server from them after my previous one died

[u/Deep_Coder]

My old dell optiplex lasted me 3 years with my workflow, I eventually upgraded to another optiplex with more ram and a better cpu. I paid around £90 for my optiplex (i5-7600, 16gig DDR3) I mean it worked to run a few docker containers and hosted a few sites. You won’t be able to find any DDR4 RAM for that budget.. a stick of 16gig is around £200 now.. look on Facebook marketplace for bargains, you will always find one.

[u/Faye-Vozora]

Check how many 3.5 inch bays the case actually has before you buy. A lot of the cheap Dell and HP office boxes are SFF and only take one, or 2.5 inch only. Lenovo ThinkCentre towers and the older Dell Precision towers usually have room for two or three. For Plex, anything 8th gen Intel or newer with an iGPU handles transcoding fine, so you don't need a graphics card. Minecraft cares more about single core speed and RAM than core count, so don't pay extra for a big CPU.

[u/garysan_uk]

I went with HP Pro Mini PC’s for my servers.

Your budget would get a G6 ProDesk with 16GB and 256gb SSD (maybe 512 if you’re lucky). I would start there and then look at offloading the storage (to a NAS) when funds allow.

[u/slightlyvapid_johnny]

My advice would be either try a N100 motherboard (from AliExpress) or do what I did split the NAS into two separate things N100 Mini PC (from Ali Express) and a separate NAS I used Fractal Design Node 304 Mini-ITX Case with a cheapo Mini-ITX size Intel B75 chipset bundle. However this is going to cost well over 250 quid.

Edit if you go the Dell optiplex route, please ensure you are 100% sure that you aren't buying 2.5 inch HDD bays. I made that mistake (twice)

[u/Psychological_Draw78]

I have a Lenovo desktop server/workstation for sale its ddr4 and can take 4x 3.5inch hdds - send me a DM

[u/fi33zie]

You may have to go on auction hunt, that's how I got my Dell Optiplex 3090 Micro FF i3 8GB RAM 240GB SSD 3 weeks ago for £136.80, gambled £40 on 2 units of used 16GB DDR4 RAM (2133P though) to replace the 8GB RAM, works fine so far, so it all came to £176.80 and I can sell the 8GB RAM to recover some spend.
I'm running a couple VMs and containers which includes Kavita, Plex, Pi hole, Nextcloud, Dispatcharr, Glance and Immich. 24/7 no problem.