Posted at 30-03-2025

A homeserver start

Hello and welcome to this new post. This week I was scrolling through Ebay, my local marketplace and Amazon looking for tech deals just because I enjoy to. And I found some interesting stuff to build a pretty cheap homeserver with, and I now want to share the ideas on here.

The server itself

For the server itself I found a HP Prodesk SFF on my local marketplace, this was listed at €80. The main specifications were a Intel Core i3 8100, 16GB DDR4 and a 256GB M.2 SSD. To me, this looks like a good price, and with some searching, you might even find a better deal or system.. But this hardware seems good to me to start with. The integrated graphics from the CPU are Intel UHD630 and that should mean hardware acceleration for transcoding media with for example Jellyfin should work pretty good. The RAM should be more than enough too. If you want to use this as a NAS there is a 3.5 inch bay which can be converted to a two 2.5 inch bay meaning you could connect two SATA SSD's pretty easily.

Storage

If you want your homeserver to have a nice redundant storage pool you could add two SATA SSD's as I mentioned above. For that I saw a great deal on Amazon. I found this deal on 960GB SATA SSD's for only €39,99 on Amazon with their Spring Sale, you could buy two and use the coupon that it has for €10,- off if you buy two of these meaning you could get two 960GB SATA SSD's for ONLY €69,98!. In my opinion this would be a great option for a lot of storage on a low price. And when you set the SSD's up to be in a RAID1 mirror your data is safe and one SSD can fail without losing any data.

My recommendations

I would recommend to get deals like the ones I just told about if you want to start getting into the world of homeservers. Or maybe even better, you could use an old desktop you do not use anymore if you have one and start that way Also I do recommend to go with TrueNAS or OpenMediaVault if you want to start building a homeserver. Especially with a good deal like with the two 960GB SATA SSD's, you could easily setup a storage server with redundancy on something in TrueNAS. And if you have hardware that runs with 2.5G Ethernet you could even get really fast performance with some SATA SSD's.

So that was my idea I just wanted to share. I hope you liked reading this. Have a great day or night and I hope to see you later!