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Comment by dugmartin | Hacker News Reader

Any suggestions for a generic cheap but good ITX running Linux from a vendor I could use for a small home server? I have two System76 Meerkats which I love (one for personal, one for work) but I don't want to fork out that much money for a home server to host things like PiHole and VaultWarden. I looked around last month for a RPi but as this article says they aren't to be found.

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If you're OK with something that is like a 30W electrical load, you can do basic things a lot cheaper by buying a used ex-corporate "SFF" or "USFF" Dell or HP x86-64 desktop PC for under a hundred bucks on ebay. They fit in a quite small space under a desk or similar.

Will almost certainly cost a lot less than buying a new mini-itx motherboard and compatible case, power supply, ram, etc.

randomly chosen example in 20 seconds of searching, figure that the shipping cost is actually $25 of the price here, built into the final buy it now price.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/204098861051?hash=item2f853d77fb:g:...

Beware power supply issues with Dell SFF PCs - an issue Dell has had for 10-15 years, if not longer.

It's also worth looking around your local area for auction houses selling old hardware, a lot of ex-gov and ex-enterprise hardware gets sold off at these places for pocket change.

Universities too. We have a surplus outlet for stuff like this.

EDIT: see at the bottom for x86 SBCs

Not ITX, but since you're responding an RPi thread, you may possibly be interested in Hardkernel's products, which have always been very competitive with RPis - in my opinion, simply better than them, although less popular.

Currently, they offer the C4 (https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c4), and the blazing fast N2+ (https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2-with-4gbyte-ram-2).

The N2+ not only ships the A73 (the successory to the RPi's A72), but it also runs it at high frequency.

I am actually a big fan of the H2(+), but sadly, went out of production (it's an x86, whose form factor I absolutely recommend).

EDIT: There actually are x86 SBCs. Two random picks:

- https://www.axiomtek.com/Default.aspx?MenuId=Products&Functi...

- https://www.seeedstudio.com/ODYSSEY-X86J4125800-p-4915.html

I've been using these for probably over ten years now for a home router, they've been solid and haven't had any problems at all:

https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

These are really great as a router/firewall. Multiple Ethernet ports, a low power (fanless) x86-64, battery backup for RTC (which is missing from a lot of SBCs), good connectivity for storage and wifi modules.

I do wish it had video out as that would simplify setup & diagnostics for me, but the serial console is fine.

Their EOL policy says the APU 2/3 should be available through 2024. However, it is their newest model. I wonder if a replacement is in the works.

For my home server I went with a Lenovo Tiny after watching the project TinyMiniMicro on Youtube[0].

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx4_QCX_khU

I run my homeserver in a Lenovo m920q I bought for about 300USD (but it's a 32GB, 1TB NVMe 9th gen i5 model, there are models from like 100USD up). These 1-liter PC's are amazing, almost completely silent, idles at like 4W, but has enough grunt to transcode for plex and other stuff like that.

Another alternative is a laptop with a failed display, from ebay or your local thrift store. Plug in an old monitor from the same place when you need to, or ssh in.

Look for USFF sized PCs on eBay. They run around $80-100 for fairly recent Intel CPUs, and don't use much power.

You can get an Intel NUC 11 Essential kit [1]. It comes with a low power N5105 Jasper Lake with 4 cores. This is an atom core (Tremont), the rev before Gracemont (Intel E-core) built on Intel 7. It's about $165 with case, power supply. You need to supply RAM (DDR4 SODIMM) and SSD (M.2 2280 NVMe or SATA). It's probably one of, if not the best bang/buck small unit on the market from a major US based vendor.

[1] https://www.tech-america.com/item/intel-nuc-11-essential-nuc...

Not ITX, but if you are willing to accept a custom form factor (which are even smaller) check out ServeTheHome's Project TinyMiniMicro, they are great bang/buck for that kind of thing. If you can wait for some company to go through an upgrade and dump a load up on ebay or whatever, you can get particularly good deals.

https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/

They aren't going to be quite as small or efficient as a Raspberry Pi or equivalent, but instead you get full x86-64 cores, and they are still pretty small and efficient.

Something like the ASRock J3455-ITX will do the job. 10 watt quad core, though my beef with this board is it features an m.2 B key wifi slot instead of an M key for an NVMe storage device which is a poor choice. There might be a better board out there with a similar low power celeron.

I have an older asrock j1900 celeron board running my 9front CPU/Disk/Auth server at home 24/7. No issues and it has been solid. At the current electric rate it costs about $2/month.

Something like a Dell thin client or what they call a Micro Form Factor could do the job. I got a couple of the micros to play around with and they're nice machines that sip power. I prefer them to rpi's now and with the pricing/availability issues of the pi's, they're price competitive used on ebay. I'm thinking there are a lot of offices that went remote and are unloading their desktops these days.

I got a Dell thin client (Wise 5070) recently for next to nothing ($85 including shipping). Its a much, much nicer machine than anything ARM I've ever had, and has no problem running more or less anything Linux you'd like (its a recent-ish Intel Celeron with UEFI firmware).

My Xigmanas based NAS runs off a Supermicro X7SPA-L mainboard I bought used on Ebay; I also built a similar one for relatives of mine with roughly the same configuration and they both still work flawlessly after years. If you can find a X7SPA-H board, it employs 6 internal SATA ports, though for more ports you can always add a cheap SATA+eSATA PCI-E controller, such as the ASM1062 based one I have on my NAS; they're cheap on Ebay. The CPU's TDP is around 10 to 13 Watt; certainly higher than a Raspberry PI 4, but in the same ballpark and well worth the gain in performance and expandability. Speed is not stellar, still enough for most tasks including serving different HD video files (important: files, not streams) to more Kodi boxes.

A future development I want to explore is using one external eSATA box so I can add more drives. I'm not sure however about any incompatibilities between BSD (or Linux) or the PCI-E controller and external SATA port multipliers.

After having direct experience with the following SFF systems, I recommend in order of descending preference (most to least):

* Gigabyte Brix - size, performance, features, expandability, longevity

* Chromebox (Asus) - size, performance, expandability, longevity

* R.Pi - size, support for Debian, longevity (I confess a particular fondness for the Pi 400)

* Odroid - size, performance

I bought an old used Buffalo TeraStation like this[1] and followed online directions for getting a generic Debian install on it. Its intended use is a NAS so in addition to running my Linux services, it can act as my media server, too. You can probably still get them at a bargain (~$100) from ebay.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Buffalo-TeraStation-Network-Attached-...

There's cheaper devices available in the same form factor as the Meerkats. Intel's NUC11ATKC2 has a recommended retail price of $130, so it's a bit more pricy than a Pi as you'd need to add about another $50 for storage and memory; but it's also a lot more powerful.

I went that route, regretted it, and bought an x86 synology. It has a docker environment that can easily be client-side encrypted and backed up to S3 or similar.

PC Engines' APU 2 line is also great, assuming it meets your needs.

I got a refurbished thin client, a Fujitsu Futro S720 with 2GB RAM (expandable via 2 slots) from ebay for 20€. Havent had the need to upgrade the RAM, but I put a 512gb mSata in it. Works great.

I bought a Lenovo Mini PC M53 on EBay. It came with with 4GB RAM and I added a 500GB SSD. It's running Debian as a small office server (Apache, SMB, SSMTP, Node-RED and Mosquitto).

I recently bought a used thinkpad from my local university surplus store for $25. Installed Linux Mint on it, then pihole and it's now my home lan ad blocker. Love it.

ODroid HC4

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/

Odroid? I bought two HC-4. I started installing one and it works fine so far.

I think I'll never be back to Raspberry after all this drama. Fool me once, etc.

I was going to ask this as well; I'm thinking about setting up a pihole but not sure what to buy for it.

Pretty much anything that can run Linux and has a network port would work. Most languages, libraries and well known software has been ported to work the same way on a lot of hardware. Save for low level hardware specific code, the rest is more or less standard.

The Orange Pi other users suggested is a good choice, as would be the very similar NanoPi, and many others. However, although the scarcity hits more the popular boards such as the Raspberries, others also became somewhat harder to find, so I would suggest for example to take note of which board is supported by a well known distribution, then look for vendors offering it. A good start would be the Armbian and DietPI download sections in which you can easily find dozens of boards and devices with their support status.

https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported

https://dietpi.com/#download

1.5 years ago I bought a Orange Pi Zero for less than 20 USD. I am using this device for pihole. Without any issue, it is running smoothly.

search for 'orange pi zero LTS', shipping included is less than $30 now, I got it for $18 all included before the pandemic(a case, power adaptor). it's solid to run pihole for me.

I'd really love to find something low power like this that can run 6-10 SATA drives without using USB.

Check out the recent additions to Topton's lineup on their Aliexpress store. They have a couple with multiple SATAs. There are some video reviews of their other units on ServeTheHome's YT channel.

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