Selfhosted

Find something on craigslist or local pickup on ebay, check government/police surplus, or do some freecycling. At least in my area a lot of people leave their e-waste computers at Best Buy, often in the doorway, nobody cares if you come and pick them up. Even if they're broken (and they're often perfectly functional and sometimes surprisingly powerful) it likely only takes a few before you've got some functional combination of parts.

It's likely not as much of a picker's heaven anymore since I imagine the huge wave of windows-10-obsolete computers being thrown away for no reason has probably mostly subsided, but there is so much old and perfectly functional stuff out there it's really unjustifiable to be buying something new especially at today's modern prices.

Where you happy with the Lenovo thinkcentre? You can often find replacement motherboards for these. It will be cheaper than any of the alternatives here.

If you want a NAS on the cheap my preference is just get any cheap "normal" PC, a case with a good amount of HDD bays. Move the drives into the PC, and you have all the expand ability you could dream of. You can find plenty of DDR4 machines for cheap now. Then as ram prices come down you can go up to 128gb of ram as long as your board has 4 slots.

Anything on craigslist/FB marketplace will work.

Set aside some for surge protection/UPS

The key here is old hardware. I built a TrueNAS box out of an old Dell Optiplex 990. I got it from a friend for free but you can find one online for well under $200. Later you can upgrade the box bit-by-bit if you care to. I upgraded the case, motherboard, cooler, and power supply over time. It’s been a capable NAS for several years even though it’s using a 2nd gen Intel core i3.

So a trick for the double drives is to pop in a low profile usb drive and install the os on that. Then you can use the ssd/hdd for other things.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #266 for this comm, first seen 1st May 2026, 03:00] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Not much right now due to LLM training hogging all of the memory across the industry. Best bet is lightly used.

Openmediavault might be an option also, if the drive thing is a problem with TrueNAS

Hit up local government auctions. Sometimes they sell 2-4 computers in a lot, sometimes they sell 157. I got 4 Lenovo mini computers for $34 each in an auction a while back. They only needed hard drives.

Any post-2015 laptop would work. Look around in your local recycling bins :D

Would a pi5 work?

I do what you are asking about literally with a 2014 Thinkpad. The only thing is I don't use any "fancy" features. For instance, with Jellyfin I ensure that the data is in a commonly supported format to ensure there is no transcoding or remuxing performed by the server itself.

So, just find any computer made in the last 7 years, slap Linux on it, and I'm sure you'll be fine.

Woot.com has lots of refurbs around that price.

It's part of Amazon so you can use your Prime shipping.

You actually can use a minipc. Minisforum has their NAB series and those have a slot in their internals for an SSD and they have an NVME slot in the motherboard. I found a NAB9 with an NVME, SSD, and 16GB of ram for around $310. So I would look for used NAB6s (cheaper than NAB9) on EBay. You should find some for under 300 with the Data SSD and NVME.

it got hit with a power surge and after lots of trouble shooting it appears the motherboard is fried

I am truly sorry for your misfortune. I feel a bit bumed right now. Others with better knowledge than I have gave suggestions. That just slapped me in the face, because I know how I certainly would feel.

I would pickup a old workstation of of a site like eBay. Last time I was shopping around they were pretty cheap but that was pretty insanity pricing