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I want to set up a home server and take advantage of everything it can offer, specialty privacy.
Raspberry PI, no matter the version, are all quite expensive here in Brazil, so that's off the table. I'll go for a regular desktop. But the the requirements for a server that "does it all" remains a mystery to me.
What specs do you guys recommend?
Find out if there are any corporate off-lease machines being sold in your area. USFF machines are frequently used as mini desktops or point of sale computers then sold off for peanuts when warranties are done. Especially look at i3-8xxx generation, as they don’t support windows 11 fully.
Any corporate fleet machines, really. Corporate C-suite executives always demand the best laptops on the market… They also demand the newest laptops on the market. Because they can’t be seen with a worse laptop than the graphic artists or the programmers. This means there’s always fresh stock of last year’s corporate laptop hitting the used market. And they’re almost always gently used, because they just sat docked on some executive’s desk for a year, and were only used to answer emails.
Those $2000 laptops often get dropped on eBay for like $250, because the random Accounting person who has to auction them off doesn’t really care how much they sell for; They’re just checking a “was sold to recoup costs” checkbox.
How does one find such retired laptops? As an individual hobbyist in the US, would I just monitor eBay, Craigslist, or Facebook?
Yes. EBay and Amazon have a certified refurbished thing with warranties for a little more money, or monitor local classified sites if you can inspect them. I’ve bought a couple off Kijiji here in Canada, which is a bit like Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. The sellers didn’t advertise that they were a business selling off-lease stuff, but you can tell by the number of laptops they post.
One hundred percent go for USFF. Even the cheapest, most basic processor will smash server roles because it's not having to power desktop applications, graphics, window managers, etc.