> if you want the resilience offered by RAID
IMHO, at that stage, you are knowledgeable enough to not listed to me anymore :P
My argument is more on the lines of using an old laptop as a gateway drug to the self-hosting world. Given enough time everyone will have a 42U rack in their basements.
raid is NOT media or connection dependent and will happily do parity over mixed media and even remote blockdevs
for the same reason i don't buy laptops with soldered SSD. if the laptop dies, chances are the SSD is still ok, and i can recover it easily.
That being said, the reason why I'm afraid of not using RAID is data integrity. What happens when the single HDD/SSD in your system is near its end of life? Can it be trusted to fail cleanly or might it return corrupted data (which then propagates to your backup)? I don't know and I'd be happy to be convinced that it's never an issue nowadays. But I do know that with a btrfs or zfs RAID and the checksuming done by these file systems you don't have to trust the specific consumer-grade disk in some random laptop, but instead can rely on data integrity being ensured by the FS.
Also, if you're paranoid avout drive behavior, run ZFS. It will detect such problems and surface it at the OS level (ref "Zebras All The Way Down" by Bryan Cantrill)
Also, because it's fun and probably many self-hosters had racked servers and plugged disks in noisy, cold big chambers and they want to live again the fun part of that.
Way more convenient to just swap out a drive then to swap out a drive and restore from backup.
I had a look at my notes and so far the only unexpected downtime has been due to 1x CMOS battery running out after true power off, 1x VPS provider randomly powering off my reverse proxy, 2x me screwing around with link bonding (connections always started to fail a few hours later, in middle of night).
This means nothing until the need to replace one drive arises, then it's not an if..
No downtime with raid 5, you can swap out one drive as needed while the rest runs just fine.
The challenge is a "bit of a backup" is risky. There's no back up if it's only a single copy of something, or even a single copy of something.
3-2-1 backups are really in time teach everyone the lesson that you don't buy storage, you buy backups, some that are more quickly accessible than others.
The cost of "maximizing" space with the drives I have, for example, is relatively trivial and simpler, its in the hundreds of dollars now instead of thousands. The upside is huge.
Solely trusting third party services is risky, and locally holding your data can be relatively managed well.
What I meant by “bit of backup” was you could actually restore files that were deleted since the last sync since it’s not always live like RAID and requires scheduled syncs to update the parity info. It’s a compromise I make as a home user for my media server.
Consumer NASes have been around for 20 years, now, though, so I think most people would just mount or map their storage.
I'm currently running Syncthing, Forgejo, Pihole, Grafana, a DB, Jellyfin, etc... on a M910 with an i5 (6th or 7th Gen) without problems.
Something with 8th gen i5 can be had for about 100-150 USD from ebay, and that's more than powerful enough for nearly all self-hosting needs. Supports 32-64gb of RAM and two SSD.
These are great and the M920q is also nice.
At 100 to 160 used these are a steal, just test the disks before you commit to long term projects with them (some have a fair bit of wear). Its newer cousins quickly climb in price to the $300+ range (still refurb/used)
The bleeding edge of this form factor is the Minisforum MS-01. At almost 500 bucks for the no ram/storage part it's a big performance jump for a large price jump. This isnt a terrible deal if you need dual SFP+ ports (and you might) and a free PCIE slot but it is a large price jump.
I’m pissed at Lenovo for making the perfect machine for a home server, and then cheaping out by not adding the $0.50 M.2 connector on the back of the board. 2xM.2 + 1xSATA requires upgrading to “Tall” Intel NUCs if you want 3 discs.
Free yes. Power efficient no. Unless you switch your laptops every two years, it's unlikely to be more efficient.
some benchmarks show the Raspberry Pi 4 idling below 3W and consuming a tad over 6W under sustained high load.
Power consumption is not an argument that's in favor of old laptops.
That is the key. The RPi works for idling, but anything else gets throttled pretty bad. I used to self host on the RPi, but it was just not enough[1]. Laptops/mini-PCs will have a much better burstable-to-idle power ratio (6/3W vs 35/8W).
1: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2022/03/16/update-to-my-zfs-ba...
I don't have a dog in this race, but I recall that RPi's throttling issues when subjected to high loads were actually thermal throttling. Meaning, you picked up a naked board and started blasting benchmarks until it overheated.
You cannot make sweeping statements about RPi's throttling while leaving out the root cause.
So that'd take 30 years to pay back. Or, with discounted cash flow applied... Probably never.
I bet Framework laptops would take this dynamic into overdrive, sadly I live in a country that they don't ship to.
It’s in my (long-term) TODO list to build my own enclosure for a Framework motherboard, to make a portable server to carry around during long trips. Something compact that carries the punch of an i7. One day…
it's true that with a bit of education, you can get pretty far with old machines
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M
Memory: 7818MiB
Those specs are showing their age for sure, but I run the TV at 1366x768, so they've been enough. The CPU has been an absolute champ. I'm sure running XFCE as the window manager has a lot to do with why it trucks along, XFCE is amazingly low footprint and snappy.
I hope Asahi for Mac Mini M4 becomes a thing. That machine will be an amazing little server 10 years from now.
Where I live (250 apartment complex in Sweden) people throw old computers in the electronics trash room, I scavenge the room every day multiple times when I take my dog out for a walk like some character out of Mad Max. I mix and match components from various computers and drop debian on them then run docker containers for various purposes. I've given my parents, cousins and friends Frankenstein servers like this. You'd be amazed at what people throw away, not uncommon to find working laptops with no passwords that log straight into Windows filled with all kinds of family photos. Sometimes unlocked iPhones from 5 years ago. It's a sick world we live in. We deserve everything that's coming for us.
I hope it reflects the fact that most people don't have a great understanding of IT and cyber security rather than a sign of a sick world ;)
I would have thought any reasonably recent laptop would be fine to leave plugged in indefinitely. Not to mention many won't have an easily removable battery anyway
Also when using an old laptop, the battery could be pretty beaten up (too many cycles or prolonged exposure to heat) or it could have been replaced by a cheap non-compliant alternative, making it harder to trust wrt fire risk. And if you have to buy a brand-new one to reduce that risk, it immediately changes all the economic incentives to use an old laptop (if you are gonna spend money, might as well buy something more suitable).
> many won't have an easily removable battery
That’s true, although I’d guess majority can still have the battery disconnected once you get access to the motherboard.
Both methods work under Asahi Linux on the ARM macs.
My homelab servers have Athlon 200GE CPUs in them: https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/athlon-200ge.c2073
They're x86 so most software works, AM4 socket so they can have the old motherboards I had in my PC previously, as well as the slower RAM from back then. At the same time they were dirt cheap on AliExpress, low TDP so I can passively cool them with heatsinks instead of fans and still powerful enough for self-hosting some software and using them as CI runners as well. Plus, because the whole setup is basically a regular PC with no niche components, the Linux distros I've tried on them also had no issues.
Honestly it's really cool that old components can still be of use for stuff like that.
Typically available regularly via ebay (or similar) as businesses rotate them out for new hardware.
The other week I picked up an i5 9400T Lenovo m720q with 16GB of memory for £100 delivered.
They practically sip power, although that's less true now I've shoved a 10Gb dual SFP NIC in there.
A friend told me about Linux. So I thought I had nothing to lose. What I didn't know is what I had to gain.
Ended up getting hooked. Grabbed computers out of the dumpster at my local community college and was able to piece together a few mildly decent machines. And even to this day I still recycle computers into random servers. Laptops and phones are usually great. They can't do everything but that's not the point. You'd be surprised what a 10 yo phone can still do.
I'm not trying to brag, but do want people to know that it's very possible to do a lot in absolutely nothing. I was living paycheck to paycheck at the time. It's not a situation I want anyone to go through, but there is a lot more free hardware out there than you think. People throw out a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff that isn't even broken! Everything I learned on was at least 5 years old at the time. You don't need shiny things and truth is that you don't get a lot of advantages from them until you get past the noob stage. It's hard, but most things start hard. The most important part is just learning how to turn it into play.
Uses a bunch of power but two orders of magnitude less in cash than buying another ECC ram desktop over 3 years.
If it blows up it cost me nothing other than an hour of part swapping.
> If it blows up it cost me nothing other than an hour of part swapping.
When you're poor you're probably less risky with expensive stuff and what's considered expensive is a low threshold.
But if it was a dumpster find... who cares?
I have a fairly high end M4 Macbook Pro but prefer to live as if I don't most of the time. All of us can take a big fall in life so it makes sense to keep one foot in both worlds.
It's about making the most of opportunity, something which is all around us and needs to be utilised.
I agree but not all laptops can run without battery being plugged in. I use a Acer E5 575 as a home-lab and it can’t run without battery being plugged in, but interestingly the laptop has decided to bypass the battery completely after it died. Operating Systems detect no battery but its there and without it the laptop won’t boot.
Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade.
Laptops are also quite power efficient at idle, so in the long run they make more sense than a desktop. If you are just starting, they are a great first server.
(And no, laptops don’t have an inbuilt UPS. I recommend everyone to remove the battery before using it plugged 24x7)
1: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/05/16/reusing-old-hardwar...