I bought an Optiplex 7050 SFF for $100 USD at the start of 2023. Upgraded it to an i7-7700, 32GB RAM, 300W PSU from an XE3 model (stock is 180W), and threw in a spare Nvidia K1200 Quadro for shits and giggles. Runs almost my entire suite of self-hosted applications without a hitch.
Mine returns a 404, but on purpose. Everything I want internet-facing is behind a cloudflare tunnel on appropriate subdomains.
It’s meant for hot swapping, so you don’t have to shut off the whole housing. But yeah, the fact that it doesn’t turn back on after a sudden power loss is… inconvenient. Mine is stationed at my parents’ place (they have gigabit fiber).
I ran Merlin for a couple years on an RT-N66U. Eventually switched to Tomato and was much happier with it.
It died a couple years ago. Replaced it with a Unifi Dream Machine. No ragrets.
I don’t know what your budget is, but I recently bought a Sabrent 4-bay housing for ~$230:
It’s got USB-C 3.2, so transfer speeds are plenty quick, and each bay has it’s own locking door and dedicated power button for easy hot swapping. The only downside is that if there’s an unexpected sudden power loss, you have to manually turn each drive bay back on, and there’s no way to do it remotely.
I have an Optiplex 7050 SFF that I dumped a few hundred dollars worth of upgrades into for shits and giggles when I ran it as my daily driver; then I built a beastly Ryzen system to daily and shunted the Optiplex over to server duties, replacing the previous server (14 year-old HP Elitedesk 8100 SFF).
The Optiplex runs everything I can throw at it with ease, far better than the HP could have ever hoped to do.
As for using old laptops that a big ehhh for me. Find yourself a used NUC instead.
Yes, but that costs money and I already have the laptop in my possession. Which is the majority reason why old laptops are used for this kind of thing.
Mother fucker
I just moved my .dev domain to Porkbun. Why couldn’t I have just waited another couple of days 🤦♂️🤦♂️
Well, to be fair, I actually bought it to use as a desktop and upgraded it accordingly. Then a few months later I decided to build a Ryzen system. Optiplex got moved to server duty.