this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
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What second hand PC/Laptop should I buy for home-labbing. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago by Venomous27@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I have never homelabbed, and this is going to be my first experience. I want to set up a home server. My current goals are to set up a gallery using Immich, an ad blocker/DNS using Pi-hole, and a cloud service.

I want you to suggest what second-hand PC or laptop I should get. I researched a bit and found out that a PC is better because of 24/7 reliability, better cooling, no risk of laptop battery swelling, easy RAM and storage expandability, and low idle power consumption.

What I think the specs should be for me is 12 GB RAM and 256 GB storage. And my budget is 10k INR.

I want to hear your thoughts. Thank you! :)

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[–] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

Lenovo T-series is generally a good pick whenever you want to run Linux.

I'd say the same for their USFF and SFF form factors as well. Great systems for homelabs, I have several (and my laptop is a T495, and my son has my old T470s).

Problem with laptops and (u)SFFs is storage capability. If you want a NAS you need some sort of external JBOD or you will be limited to 1-2 storage disks (and possibly have to boot I.e. truenas from USB).

If you can find them with a PCIe slot (or extra m.2 slot that exposes 4 lanes at least), you should be able to get a RAID card and rig up a way to use eSATA and some sort of external disk enclosure though.

Pay attention to performance/watt. Consider different boxes for different roles if you want...I.e. ZFS doesn't need a lot of processing power, but it does like RAM. If you have a system that can use dirt-cheap DDR3(L) like a 6th or 7th gen Intel, that may be a better choice for NAS-only.

Then use a more powerful NUC or (u)sff for proxmox and run LXCs or VMs on it.